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PhilosophyThe basic idea of a Church Planting movement is the planting of a special kind of church that will cause the spontaneous starting of an endless stream of churches. While this is exciting, we feel that there are major draw backs to this approach. 1) Most CP movements are led by Western Missions organisations and this causes the statistics that are collected to be "guilded" - i.e. embellished so that the support will continue to flow; 2) Most church models are Western and are dependent upon factors that are not found in most missions fields. This leads to the inability of these church models to be easily duplicated. We feel that the better way is to follow Jesus' formula. Like someone put it, "Don't plant the church, rather plant the gospel. The gospel will grow, and the container in which it grows is the church! Put another way, Jesus said, "I will build My church!" However, NEVER do we see a command to start a church! Rather, the command is to go and make Disciples of all Nations. As disciples are made and grow, they will naturally live out their christian life, and minister! They will also naturally gather into groupings - and - behold - that is the church!	Catalysts We feel that in order for this to happen, churches and missions organisations must step away from positions of control and directing, to one of being catalysts. At NHM we realise this and have made the transisition from the traditional approach of strategizing and directing, to one of seed planting, equiping/empowering and then standing aside to see what God will do! After all it is His church and He knows best! We have seen huge gains in the work as a result of this change in approach. It is also a lot easier as we do not have to build a massive infrastructure that requires a huge fund-raising effort to maintain. It is also a much fresher approach as it alloow our ministry partners the opportunity to really grow to become who they are meant to be in God!
New Paradigms Therefore, instead of setting up Bible Training centres to train Church Planters, we have taken a very different approach. We have re-defined the church according to what the New Testament says it is. This simplifies the requirements by the order of multitudes! One thing we learnt early on - you cannot Multiply unless you can Duplicate! And in order to Duplicate, the process must be Simple! We feel that a discipleship paradigm is far more biblical than a Church Planting one. If and when we enpower Christians to be all that they were meant to be, the church will explode. It is such a rebuke to our evangelism efforts when we compare the potential of real discipleship with our traditional approaches. If each christian would just win one soul to the Lord in one year, and the next the tow will make another two, and so on, the whole world could be won to the kingdom in 6 short years!	Loose NetworksA part of the enpowering process is the provision of a network of like minded workers to exchange support and ideas. As the network grows, this provides opportunities for the body to find outlets for mission and ministry. It also allows what the Bible says the body should do in Ephesians 4 - Build itself up in love!
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New Horizons Ministries International

Church Planting Movements - Mark II