| CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Reproductive Cycle #3: Developing and Sending Out Church Planting Teams
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: REPRODUCTIVE CYCLE #3:Developing and Sending Out Church Planting Teams
Many avenues exist for churches to train and send missionaries. We encourage the churches to keep the vision for missions in front of the congregations. Also a local team of church planters working in harmony with existing fellowships of house churches offers unique opportunities for training and sending missionaries. Almost half the world is closed to missions, and does not allow any type of traditional church structure to exist within its borders. The house church model, however, offers great opportunities to reach these countries for Christ and enable the church to fulfill its mandate to preach the gospel to every creature. We encourage the house churches to keep an eye out for people with an interest in church planting, and cooperate with other house churches in putting together church planting teams to penetrate new areas. In order to encourage this, the Fellowship of Church Planters, after reproducing a second team, established the Fellowship of Church Planting Teams. This is a loose confederation of church planting teams which interface for strength, stability and mutual edification. It facilitates coaching, training, and ongoing accountability between the team coordinators. As we have spread we have become the Fellowship of Church Planters International. The house churches continue to implement the vision to recruit, equip and send men to the teams. We expect that this will lead more and more to sending teams to other parts of the world. This chapter gives a summary of the Fellowship of Church Planting International. FCPI works in cooperation with already existing missions, such as Frontiers, to facilitate the training, sending and ongoing help to teams in the field. As you read through the chapter you will see that we have implemented may house church principles in starting church planting teams. For more on this subject please order the book Building Effective Church Planting Teams, by Dick Scoggins, available through the Fellowship of Church Planters. (At the time of this revision, the house churches of RI in cooperation with the Fellowship of Church Planting teams has trained over 38 missionaries who are presently serving oversees planting house churches.) Back |