Missions Catalyst e-Magazine is a free, weekly electronic missions digest designed to inspire and equip Christians worldwide for global ministry. Please use it for your prayers, pass along what you learn to others, and forward this edition to anyone you think might be interested.

In This Issue

UKRAINE - Evangelism Teams to Plant Churches in 40 Cities

SRI LANKA - Correction and Report from a Local Contact

GHANA - Four Thousand New Churches!

BHUTAN - Film Team Brings Gospel Story to Life

JAPAN - VIP Clubs Leading Japanese to Christ

YEMEN - Seven Christians Detained

Wildlife will be playing on July 4th at Avalon Park - it will be a big crowd!

Check it out and let me know your thoughts: Jesus in China

Which church planter do you think is better prepared to start a church planting movement in their new culture? Jim or Wendy?

Jim was an experienced church planter from the sunny Southwest states. He had been on teams that had started 2 churches sent out from Grace Community, a large church of about 10,000 people. When they began their new churches, it had been with a startup group of 500 people. They were well-funded and they worked from a carefully crafted plan. The team they had put together was carefully selected based on gifting. Jim’s new challenge, however was radically different. Jim had moved to arctic Siberia to begin a church planting movement among nomadic, Eskimo-like people who live in the tundra, typically in government housing projects or as nomadic herders (or both!).

Wendy, Jim’s team mate, was from a house church in the Midwest. Her parents had started a couple of house churches when she was a teenager and after returning home from college it was only natural for her to get involved. Her church met on Monday evenings, shared a meal together, and then enjoyed a time of fellowship. There was virtually no program and hardly even a leader since all members of the group were encouraged to participate. When the group reached about 25 in size, they agreed to split up into new groups. Over the years, Wendy had seen a couple of dozen of these small churches birthed.

Could it be that the house church movement holds the best hope for raising up a generation of church planters? Some think so.

The House Church Movement

According to statistic compiled by pollster George Barna, the house church movement in American numbers anywhere from 5 million to 20 million people.(1) This wide range indicates that we don’t have a firm grasp on the size and scope of this movement. Another interesting fact is that most (66% to 78%) also attend a traditional church. So, even those involved aren’t exclusive in their application of the house church idea.

When the lens is widened past the United States to include the global church, a vastly different picture comes into focus. House churches dominate many Asian Christian movements, notably in China. From my travels to various missionary teams around the world, house churches are much more common goals for missionaries than the traditional model. Certainly in areas where persecution has forced the church underground a “house” model of church makes a great deal of sense.

House Churches Among the Unreached

When I was a missionary in Croatia I came back to the United States and brought a pastor with me to visit some churches who were potential partners in our forming church. As we walked into a large mega-church building to setup our room for that night’s presentation he was shaking his head. “Sto?”, or “What?” I asked him, and he replied, “This one classroom is larger than any meeting space we have in Croatia.” This large classroom was not something the pastor could project into his own context.

Whether the issue is persecution, money or any number of pragmatic obstacles, the simple church model is naturally suited to the realities of cross-cultural church planting among the unreached—particularly in ‘closed’ nations.”

Church planters who have experience ministering in smaller settings and understand the dynamics of how the Holy Spirit leads in these contexts are equipped to reproduce this model worldwide. Those within the missions community have long known that entrepreneurs with humble expectations are oftentimes the workers who make things happen over the long haul.

Yet another factor to consider is how we fund and support the on-field missionary. Data found in the report, “The State of Church Giving through 2005” shows that charitable giving has grown along with per capita disposable income. Unfortunately, it also shows that the amount of that funding that goes toward “benevolence” (which includes missionary outreach) has not changed. (2) This leads to the conclusion that while we give more to church, the church gives less to the world. Consider this from a Time magazine article on the simple church:

Indeed, house churching in itself can be an economically beneficial proposition. Golden Gate Seminary’s [church planting professor D. Allan] Karr reckons that buildings and staff consume 75% of a standard church’s budget, with little left for good works. House churches can often dedicate up to 90% of their offerings. Karr notes that traditional church is fine “if you like buildings. But I think the reason house churches are becoming more popular is that their resources are going into something more meaningful.” (3)

House church members should not look on their congregational size as an indicator of small global impact. In the area of finances, small churches pack big potential.

Connecting the House Church to the Unreached

As most house church planters know, a church is not a building and one doesn’t “go” to church. In a parallel paradigm, missionary agencies should not be organizational institutions. Instead, we need to understand them as “apostolic networks” of church planters. If we make this leap, there is seamless integration with the nature and mission of the house church. There is one more element to add to this mix, however, and that is the nature of where the churches are planted.

When missionaries use the term “unreached” they are not talking about unsaved people nor are they referring to unchurched people. They are referring to entire cultures that have no access to gospel. The biblical paradigm of the ethne (greek for “nation” or “ethnic people group” is not within the scope of this article, but the church, including its manifestation of the house church, is commanded to engage across these cultural borders.

Apostolic teams of church planters benefit from a solid system of preparation and on-going support. There is also a connection with administration, employment and visa issues, member care, and a host of other issues that missionary agencies can provide. House church structures may benefit even more from these support systems than traditional churches.

Unfortunately, many house churches do not recognize their own potential to impact Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and Tribal societies. Much of the “emerging church” literature has been focused on outreach to post-modern societies. While there is much work to be done among the post-moderns, there are vast populations that live outside of the West that hunger for a relationship with the living God.

As an insider in missionary agency leadership circles, I have observed that some agencies have decided that it is more expedient to work with mega-churches because of their potential to fund large projects. However, for those agencies whose goal is to plant churches (like the one I work for, Pioneers), large-scale projects are often counter-productive. We benefit from missionaries who have lived and breathed the house church “air” as it makes the path to field success much shorter, and straighter.

House church leaders should be aware that some missionary agencies are very motivated to connect with them. Yet, the decentralized nature of the house church makes it difficult to develop a meaningful dialogue. We long for deeper relationships and the opportunity to be re-formed by house churches across North America. Help us to better understand and reach out to you.

Conclusion

In sharing my heart with you I hope that all expressions of Christ’s church have a place at the missionaries’ table, the house church included. I know that I speak for more than Pioneers. We look forward to seeing how we can join hands in a way that sends more missionaries into the most spiritually dark neighborhoods in the world.

We live in the era of history in which the church of Jesus Christ is experiencing its greatest growth (yes - I mean, even more than in the first century!). House churches can and should play a larger role in this. The truth is that house churches, outside of the West, already are! The question for the house church in North America is this: Will they join with God in raising up millions of new, simple, congregations?

1.  http://www.barna.org. Barna has a great number of statistic on the house church movement.
2. The State of Church Giving through 2005 Abolition of the Institutional Enslavement of Missions. 2007. Empty Tomb. p. 13.
3. Why Home Churches are Filling Up - TIME. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl… (Accessed March 4, 2008).

Missions Catalyst e-Magazine is a free, weekly electronic missions digest designed to inspire and equip Christians worldwide for global ministry. Please use it for your prayers, pass along what you learn to others, and forward this edition to anyone you think might be interested.
News Briefs, edited by Pat Noble, appear twice a month.

In This Issue

Practical Mobilization - Top Ten Myths about Missions - Part 2

Myth #5 - It’s All about Meeting Needs

Myth #6 - It’s Just One More Thing

Myth #7 - It’s All Missions

Myth #8 - All Mission Effort Has the Same Strategic Value

Myth #9 - God Only Uses Americans and Other Westerners

Myth #10 - God Has Given Up on Americans / Westerners

Conclusion

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Visit the Story’08 website for more details.

Five years ago wouldn’t have traded my lifestyle or career with anyone I knew. I managed the operation of a Lockheed L-1011 jet that is specially modified to launch rockets carrying small satellites into orbit. After work and on weekends I worked as a flight instructor, and several times each month flew as co-pilot on a business jet to destinations throughout the Pacific Northwest. It was a life of independence, challenge and excitement, and life was good. Church life kept me busy, too. For ten years my wife and I had championed the cause of missions at our local church, urging folks to pray, give, or go, as God would lead. My salary continued to climb, and the job assignments and flight experience continued to get more interesting.

One day I stumbled across II Timothy 2:3 in my Bible reading: “Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus.” While this verse has been misinterpreted as commanding an ascetic or otherwise miserable life, I had to admit that my life at that time was playing out near the other extreme, handily avoiding any hardship on behalf of the gospel. I came to the conclusion that, at least in my case, there was dissonance between my comfortable existence and the dying to self that God’s people are called to in Scripture, which Ralph Winter calls a “wartime lifestyle.” That very day, I made the decision before God to pursue a lifestyle that clearly put Him first.

My childhood overseas acquainted me from the beginning with the work of missions. Attending the IVCF Urbana missions conference (I carry in my Bible the decision card I filled out back in 1984), taking a course titled Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, and going on a short term missions trip added perspective to my early memories, and acquainted me with God’s Big Plan. I began to understand that the Great Commission is not just for missionaries; it summarizes the task of the whole Church until Christ returns! Other passages tell us the details of what the Church is to be; how we are to relate to others; how we ought to serve and worship God; but, our overall task is to “make disciples.” The scope of this task extends to “all nations,” and we are to be about this task until “the end of the age.” So, now I had not only a commitment to pursue a wartime lifestyle, but now also a clear job description to go with it.

The clincher came through a third passage, the twin parables of the Hidden Treasure and the Pearl of Great Price found in Matthew 13. I realized that whatever good things I was enjoying, while not inherently wrong in any way, could not begin to compare with the rewards that I could enjoy by committing my life to pursuing exactly what Jesus had commanded His church to be about! Jesus made it clear that the good things of the Kingdom of Heaven could be obtained only through a thorough exchange of priorities.

Note that I have said nothing about being drawn to Japan. I never was “drawn” here. There is nothing here that naturally attracts me. I am motivated by the conviction that God really does mean for the Church to go to the ends of the earth to make disciples. I want to spend my life in obedience to the last command issued before the Lord was taken up into Heaven. I am not a big or important person, but I desperately want to tie my life into something big and important. I found out what that is, and through God’s grace and providence, hope to plant churches in the sometimes thorny ground of Japan.

I wouldn’t trade my lifestyle or career with anyone I know.

This is a recorded Skype interview with an American who has been helping with the earthquake relief efforts in China.

If you want to give financially to assist in this disaster, here’s how:

1. Use this link for donations to Pioneers: https://secure.call-kc.com/pioneers/
2. It will ask “Please accept my gift for:” and choose “Other”
3. Use account number #150262
4. Under “Special Instructions” you can put “China Relief” but it’s not necessary if the number is in correctly.

Check this amazing story out. It’s a true story about how an credit manager from Home Depot became the lead singer for Boston.