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.