by Dr. James H. Montgomery

For years, Freddie Gwanzura of the Apostolic Faith Mission in
Zimbabwe, struggled to fill the 300 seats in his little church on the
outskirts of town. Then a famous evangelist pitched his 10,000-seat tent
just one kilometer away. Finally, he thought, his congregation of 60
would increase dramatically.

The tent was full every night of the crusade. Miracles were
performed. People came and repented in the thousands. Freddie and his
church tried their best to "keep the fish in the net." A year
later, however, he reports there was one woman attending who he thought
had been won at the crusade. They were still a church of 60 members.

Looking strategically at the harvest field

"The one benefit of the crusade," Freddie says, "was
that we had learned the hard way that we could not project our
responsibility to evangelize and see the church grow on a visiting
evangelist. So we began to do our own evangelism and follow up, using
every kind of method the Lord gave us. Even funeral services became an
outreach opportunity."

Gradually, the pews of his church began to fill and even spill over
into the courtyard as attendance swelled to 400. To solve this new
problem, they spun off some of their people from the main fellowship to
a nearby town. The breathing room they anticipated did not materialize,
so here and there they planted still more new churches.

"When the DAWN (Discipling A Whole Nation) consultation came to
our area," Freddie says, "I came to realize my vision was not
complete. I had my eyes opened to the importance of research and good
information. I had no idea how big my harvest field was, how many
villages or towns were in it. I had not looked to see where there were
churches or where there were no churches. DAWN showed me how to look at
my province, my section of the harvest field.

"The Lord caused me to see that the existing churches were a
drop in the bucket in terms of what we needed. I realized that our job
would not be done until there was a church there for everybody."

Today, Freddie has over 200 congregations under his supervision and
is carrying more than his share of the load in seeing 10,000 new
churches started in Zimbabwe as part of the national strategy called
Target 2000. Other local churches and denominations have caught the same
church-planting vision so that more than half of their ten-year goal has
already been reached.

Freddie Gwanzura and the church of Zimbabwe represent a small
sampling of a world-wide movement to return to the basics, to again
focus on the multiplication of cells of believers, of new congregations,
until there is one within practical and cultural distance of every
person in a nation and in every nation.

Currently we are aware of over 40 countries that have developed
national strategies with a combined goal of planting nearly 3 million
new churches. In the Philippines, where the Discipling A Whole Nation
strategy was first modeled, about 25,000 new churches have been
established during the past 22 years, a six-fold increase over the 5,000
existing in 1975. Nine nations in Latin America alone have started about
45,000 new churches as they implemented their national strategies in the
past four or five years.

Even in Great Britain, where the dominant Church of England had been
in steady decline for several decades, church planting has emerged as a
major new emphasis. In a message sent to the second Challenge 2000
(DAWN) Congress in March, 1995, The Most Reverend Dr. George Carey,
Archbishop of Canterbury, acknowledged that "Church planting is
proving to be one of the most exciting developments in this decade of
evangelism. In many parts of this country we are seeing these adventures
of faith resulting in genuine numerical growth." Reports at the
congress indicate there were indeed genuine "adventures of
faith." "There has been a huge change in the official position
of many denominations towards the issue of church planting,"
reported Chris Forster, then Director of the Challenge 2000 (DAWN)
project. "Every major Protestant denomination has adopted a
church-planting policy. Our careful research now indicates that in the
first five years of this decade over 1,500 churches were started, the
majority being in 1992 and 1993 (after the first national
congress)." Though the greater part of such national projects have
been initiated and found their greatest success in third world nations,
a number of instructive features emerge from the England experience. One
is the oft repeated maxim of Peter Wagner that "church planting is
the most effective evangelistic method under heaven." Three
independent studies in England all came to the same conclusion. In the
survey of 350 churches conducted by Challenge 2000, for example, it was
found that the 64 churches planted since 1989 had grown an average of
75% per year! By contrast, even the strong evangelical/charismatic
churches established prior to that date were increasing at just 6%
annually. In other words, the study concluded, the new church plants
were growing 12 times as fast as established churches. Furthermore, the
Challenge 2000 survey showed that 68% of the growth in the new
congregations was from conversions and renewals and only 25% from
transfers. Under these healthy conditions, the new churches flourished
in all seven environments considered. These included cities, industrial
communities, metropolitan areas, mixed areas, remote areas, resort
environments and new towns.

Incidentally, the survey also showed that the 55 churches that had
given birth to new congregations had grown on average 31.5% between 1990
and 1994 while the non-planting churches grew by only 19.6%. This
knocked in the head the fear that starting new congregations retards the
growth of parent churches.

Though the preponderance of evidence from the data we have gathered,
and are familiar with from around the world, supports this high
correlation between growth and church planting, such growth does not
happen automatically. Failure to bring overall growth sometimes occurs
when new congregations are carved out of larger churches rather than
brought to life through evangelistic effort. A small group of members
hiving off from a mother church can be left with poorer preaching, less
professional music, smaller and therefore less enticing youth groups and
on down the line of other church services.

More of the same kind of church?

As with the case of Freddie in Zimbabwe and the churches in England
mentioned above, there must be a zeal, a commitment and a plan to do
effective evangelism which leads to growth in mother churches and in new
church plants. To truly result in overall growth and ‘not just the
transfer of marbles from one pocket to another’ there must also be great
sensitivity to the cultural or societal slice of the population that is
being targeted. While implementing a city-wide project in Portland,
Oregon (USA), for example, leaders concluded they needed a "new
kind of church for a new kind of convert." In other words, they
came to realize that even the new churches being planted were not
reaching beyond the evangelical fringe.

There were great segments of the population that were not, and could
not, be reached with just more of the same. Similarly, as leaders
evaluated the situation after the second Congress in England in 1995,
they concluded that 20,000 more churches of the same kind in existence
would not do the country much good. On the other hand, if they really
wanted to impact the whole nation, 20,000 more churches of the right
kind would not be nearly enough. This calls for a whole new look at the
definition of "church" and a return to the church planting
models of the New Testament that made them so dynamic, the subject for
another set of articles!

Prayer and training go hand in hand

There must also be an effective leadership training program. Though
the results have been fantastic in the Philippines, recent data
gathering has revealed a larger-than-expected death rate of new
congregations. A growing conviction is that a major factor has been the
lack of adequate training either for the church planter or the pastor
who would build up the new congregation. There is no real growth if as
many are being lost out the back door as are coming in through the
front.

And, of course, all the effort must be bathed in effective,
intercessory prayer. The contrast between church planting efforts in
such disparate places as Guatemala and Zimbabwe illustrate this crucial
element. Doing research around Guatemala City, Dawn missionary Roy
Wingerd came across a nearby town of 10,000 that had just one small
congregation of about 20. He discovered that a number of other churches
had been planted there, but they all disintegrated with no long-term
growth. In the following year, three other attempts were made at
planting a church.

They all ultimately failed

Wingerd learned that all three attempts were made without prayer
covering, without intentionally interceding, without asking the Lord to
give them this area. It was later learned that the priest of the
religion in that municipality was adamantly opposed to evangelicals.
Furthermore, there was a lot of religious syncretism, a lot of combining
some Christian practices with worship of animals and animistic objects.
Without realizing it or doing anything about it, they were up against a
real spiritual stronghold.

Richmond Chiundiza experienced a similar situation in Zimbabwe. Some
of his church members went out on a number of occasions with the intent
of planting a church in a new area. They failed every time. So burdened,
so frustrated were these folks that they decided to dedicate themselves
to six months of prayer for that area. This was culminated with
round-the-clock prayer on the weekend of their next attempt which began
with an open-air service on a Friday night. The result was that by
Sunday evening many had come to know the Lord, they had started a new
church, the people that had come to know the Lord had provided the money
to rent a vacant store in a strip-mall, and someone had already been set
aside to pastor the new flock!

Church multiplication

The problems are there, of course, but the momentum that is
gathering around the world for the multiplication of new churches is
more than just a return to a method that "works." I have come
to believe that the proliferation of congregations imitating the life of
Christ so that there is one within easy access of every person of
"every class, kind and condition of mankind," in Dr. Donald
McGavran’s words, is the most direct way to work at the completion of
the Great Commission. This is ultimately what Freddie discovered in
Zimbabwe. In the 1960’s, the whole church growth movement burst on the
scene precisely because vigorous church planting had lost its momentum.

Realizing that much of the intended content had been squeezed out of
the term "church growth," McGavran, in the last months of his
life, emphatically stated that we should change our terminology:
"Don’t call it church growth anymore; call it church
multiplication," he said. As we meet with top-level church leaders
in more than 120 nations that are in the process of developing
church-multiplication projects or asking for help to begin, we find over
and over the same sentiment expressed in various ways.

On an international level, all three major evangelical bodies are
emphasizing church multiplication. A number of years ago, Tom Houston
reported the Lausanne Committee decided against encouraging national
strategies of their own since the DAWN movement was already carrying out
this vision. In the Fall of 1995, the AD2000 and Beyond Movement
affirmed twin goals: One was to see church-planting movements begun in
all the remaining 1,729 unreached people groups and to see church
multiplication national initiatives along the lines of DAWN established
in every country. In 1995, the World Evangelical Fellowship signed a
Mutual Assistance Agreement with Dawn Ministries. "We were looking
for an agency that had a successful strategy of working with national
churches to complete the Great Commission," said Jun Vencer,
International Director for WEF. "Dawn Ministries with its strategy
of saturation church planting fills that bill."

A number of regional bodies have likewise embraced the church
multiplication paradigm. These include Hope for Europe, The Alliance for
Saturation Church Planting (eastern Europe), and COMIBAM (Latin
America). The overwhelming conclusion we are forced to is that the vast
multiplication of churches, despite the potential pitfalls, is an idea
whose time has returned. We believe it is an effort in cooperation with
the oft repeated Old Testament prophecy that "The earth will be
filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord" (Hab. 2:14).

Reproduced with permission from http://www.lausanne.org