Just a quick note to let you know that I will be traveling in Africa until 5 May.  I will be in Kenya until until 26 April, then I will be in Egypt.  On 6 - 7 May I will be in meetings in San Jose, California.
 
Please pray for safe travel and for the people who will participate in the church planting training conferences.
 

Gaining access to a community is the first step.  Finding the Person of Peace is the next step.  Actually, if we do things right, the Person of Peace will find us.  Learning how to be found is the key to the Second Transition Point.
 

Access is about entry into a community to whom we are strangers.  Appropriate access is about entering this new community without adding additional barriers to being a stranger.  Most church planters enter a new community and announce they are religious workers, pastors, church planters, evangelists, and etc.  In most, if not all situations, this immediately adds trem

After the Webinar on April 3, there were requests for the Critical Elements of a Church Planting Movement.  Please find following the list.  Foundational for this list is the Group Process, when provides group memory and group accountability which causes the system to be self-correcting and protects against heresy. 

There are five major transition points that a church planter must manage well.  Each transition point is a place where the church plant can fail before it has the opportunity to become a fully functional church.  Understanding these transition points and being prepared to address these points as they arise can help the church planter be more successful and experience less stress.

(John King is the pastor of Stones River Church of Christ in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  John has served with our ministry as a volunteer in Africa, has joined me in training events as a presenter, and is currently serving on our Curriculum Development Team.  He is one who knows the Word, teaches and preaches the Word, but, most importantly, lives the Word. - David Watson)

I depart on 7 March 2008 for Chiang Mai, Thailand.  I return to Irving on 15 March. The purpose of this trip is to continue the curriculum development process we began in August 2007. 
 

If you want to see a Church Planting Movement (CPM) you must understand and maintain the different roles of Inside and Outside Leaders.  In traditional church planting the outsider who plants the church often becomes the pastor of the church.  The Outside Leader becomes the Inside Leader.  This makes church planting almost impossible to rapidly replicate, and there is no reason to reproduce leaders since the Outside Leader stays in charge.  For CPM to happen the Outside Leader stays outside and equips/teaches/trains/coaches/mentors the Inside Leader, who in turn does the same with his/her people.

One of the tragic errors of the modern church is the exporting of traditional Christian culture as if it were Biblical truth.  Much of what has been taught in missions and church planting efforts over the past two hundred years has been about the culture of modern Christianity in addition to, and sometimes instead of, the Bible.  It is startling how easily we pass on non-Biblical Christian/Church culture to new peoples, and do so in such a way that the force of our cultural teachings often exceeds the force of our Biblical teachings.

The Person of Peace is the one God has prepared to receive the Gospel for the first time into a community.Our understanding of the Person of Peace changes the way we plant churches.  It radically increases the number of churches planted.  We have seen church planting teams go from planting a few churches per year to planting dozens of churches every year, and in some cases, even hundreds of new churches every year.