Wednesday, June 13, 2007

My Journey to CPM, part 2

In my last post, I described my journey to receiving a vision for church planting internationally. After years of local church ministry, I was on my first short term mission trip in Honduras, when the burden for church planting crystallized in my life. When I returned from that trip, I got in contact with one of our mission agency's affiliated missionaries. His name is Randy Travis and he had been a part of WME since 1988. He had planted four churches in Honduras by that time and was also working in southern Mexico.

Randy and I spent some time together while he was doing some iteneration in May of 1994. From that time on, he and I became strategists together to understand and plan the most effective methods of church planting that we could find. This collaboration ultimately came to total fruition in September 2006, but that is a story for a little later.

Meanwhile, Randy shared his research with me and over the next few years he helped educated me on cutting edge missiological insights, especially in relation to church planting. Over the next few years, not only did I imbibe the insights of Donald McGavran and C. Peter Wagner, but also Ralph Winter, David Hesselgrave, and Tom Steffen. I did not meet these people, but studied their writings deeply.

In 1995, I became a Senior Pastor and spent several years with a lot of focus on local church growth and the cell church model. Bethany World Prayer Center in Louisiana was a mentoring church to ours and the G-12 model was tested in our work. I even traveled to Colombia to see the G-12 model at it's fountainhead.

Meanwhile our mission agency WME grew and grew. We developed partners all over the world during the late 1990s. (As I describe some of these partnerships here and in other posts, I will sometimes use pseudonyms in discussing them for security reasons). One such partnership was with Joseph Paul Karnataka (or JPK as I like to refer to him). He was a successful church planter based in North India.

JPK and I met through a network of churches that we both had a relationship with and our initial face to face meeting was in December of 1994 (apparently a year of turning points in terms of my church planting experience).

JPK became the official rep for our mission agency in India in the latter years of the 1990s. Between 1988 and 2007 his ministry has planted close to 1000 churches in his country. His training schools became the model that our agency adopted as a strategy for church planting. WME took his model and used versions of it in Romania, South Africa and Indonesia, as well as continuing partnership with JPK in India. Between 2000 and the end of 2006, we had planted over 200 churches in these countries.

Then came the last piece of the puzzle that moved us from church planting to church planting movements. In early 2000, our mission agencies field director picked up a copy of a small booklet called "Church Planting Movements" by David Garrison. He brought me the book and after I devoured it, I knew that this was what we were after in terms of our strategy. When I compared what I read in the booklet with the strategy of JPK, I thought it was the same thing. Only after about four years did I really realize that while our strategy was planting churches, they were not becoming "Movements". Something had to change.

More to come in Part 3.

Monday, June 4, 2007

My Journey to CPM, part one

To get started, I want to tell about my journey into involvement with church planting movements. Hopefully this will let my readers understand where I am coming from as well as help them discover the concepts of cpm as I did.

I was born in the early 1960s to a committed christian couple. My parents were pastors of an evangelical church and I accepted the Lord as my personal savior at a very early age. From the beginning of my christian walk, I was very committed to the Lord and wanted to serve Him. While still a young person, I sensed a call to ministry and even began to preach whenever I would have an opportunity while I was still a teenager.

In order to pursue my call to ministry, I went to Lee College in Cleveland, Tennessee, a christian liberal arts college. There I received great theological training and met my wife, Patty. We married during my senior year there.

Although I loved the Lord and was enthusiastic about ministry, I really did not have a burden or vision for world missions at the time. Mainly it was because of a lack of information, I believe. At any rate, in my last semester of college during a chapel service, I heard a missionary speak. The passion and anointing on the man's life probably impacted me more than the content of his message. All I know is that when I walked out of that chapel service, I knew that missions was to be a part of my life. During his talk, he introduced me to C. Peter Wagner, and after the chapel I rushed to the bookstore and bought Wagner's book on missions, "On the Crest of the Wave". That book introduced me to the world of missions and to church growth.

After college, I came home to the church that my dad pastored and was brought on staff to help start a christian elementary and high school. God blessed my ministry there and I was very busy, but the passion for missions that had been birthed in that chapel only grew as the years went by. Our church supported some missionaries, but there was a desire to do much more.

In 1988, I helped start a small missions agency to be a ministry of helps to missionaries. This ministry, World Missions and Evangelism, was launched to help a couple of missionaries in Honduras. One of our missionaries from the first year of WME was a church planter.

By 1994, I had studied church growth, revival, and missions literature to the point that I began to see that although there are a number of wonderful things that we can do in missions, the most important thing that we can do is help multiply indigenous churches. My reading of Donald McGavran had become very influential in my thinking.

That set the stage for my first international trip. Yes, believe it or not, until then I had never been out of the USA. But in April 1994, myself and 3 other christian brothers went to Honduras on a short term trip to see the work of one of our missionaries. What a life change.

We went from village to village preaching and encouraging and visiting the churches that our missionary was working with. The poverty and need of the people touched me, but so did the commitment of the pastors who were paying such a price to lead God's people. It was on April 6 that I found a quiet place to seek God while the other team members were doing other things. In prayer a vision to help plant indigenous churches in Honduras and probably elsewhere was born. I knew, beyond a shadow of doubt that a church planting ministry was the strategy that WME should pursue if we were going to make a impact for God in the world.

I came home determined to move our little missions agency in the direction of church planting.

More to come in Part 2.

Friday, June 1, 2007

Welcome to Church Planting Movements

Hello,
My name is David Parish. Welcome to my blogspot about Church Planting Movements. In this blogspot, I will be sharing my thoughts and experiences concerning CPM.

Let me begin by telling you a little about who I am. I am a "40 something" pastor of a missions-minded church. I also work with a missions agency and the mission program of a fellowship of churches. When I was a bible college student, over 20 years ago, God called me to be in missions. Finally 13 years ago, I launched out on my first short-term mission trip. It was on that mission trip to the Central American country of Honduras that a vision to help the kingdom of God advance through church planting gripped me. From that day, I started a journey that I am still on. We have planted over 200 churches in the last 7 years and our goals for the next several years is to plant thousands of churches world-wide.

I will be posting here weekly (or as much as possible) about Church Planting Movements and the work that I am doing.