We have been seeing an outpouring of God's Spirit in numerous places around the globle. It has been evidenced in the planting of 100's of new churches in many different countries. Planting new churches is the most effective way to evangelize a city, a country, a continent. But these churches are part of a movement to establish 'indigenous churches'.
To many in the ABA 'indigenous' is a new term. It's not new, just new to us. It means essentially that something can grow, reproduce, and thrive naturally without any outside or foreign intervention. This, we are learning, is working well with the establishment of new churches in foreign countries that are self-supporting, self-governing, self-propagating and scripturally sound from the 'git go'.
It is time to adapt these principles of indigenous church planting to the USA. We would be establishing many more churches if we seriously considered allowing new churches to be indigenous from the beginning. It would be cost effective. It would call for spiritual leaders to be raised up from their own congregations. It would solve a lot of problems and maybe create some new ones. But, churches would be started. We can work out those challenges that will come. Let's just begin.
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2 comments:
Hi Bro David, It was great to get to meet you again at the ABA. I enjoy reading your blog. We will continue to pray for your outreach. Pray for us to Redlands FMBC builders, Redlands, Ca
www.thethiems.blogspot.com
John and Esther Thiem
I think indigenous churches are awesome. I read something on another blog that suggested we (aba) change our way of thinking. The author suggested that instead of putting someone on state funding ideffinitely that they be allowed a salary and ministry expenses for a set time like 3 years. I think this would be awesome. There are far too many on the aba funding and have been for many years. As long as the same ones are draining the funds year after year there will be no new churches.
I asked my pastor about our church catching the wave and getting out front in the 100 new churches and he said that the church had started two 20-30 years ago and they were still sucking funds from the church.
I don't mean to sound crude or anything but that is freeloading. If you can't make it work in 2-3 years then maybe God isn't in it.
We need to get a wave of people who are willing to be held accountable for the funds they receive and get out there and get busy.
It's time we took the high road. Jesus took 11 men and in the span of 3 years turned the world upside down.
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