One of the most common questions we get from other church planters is, “How did you get them from ‘group’ to ‘church’?”  For us, this was one of the easier parts of our church planting journey, not because of any special effort or wisdom on our part, but simply the framework of how the believers were already operating allowed the transition to happen organically.

 

The groups had been studying the Bible for over a year, meeting with us weekly as we walked through the stories. By their own initiative, they also began meeting on their own. During that independent weekly time of worship, they studied the Bible stories (listening to, practicing and talking about them) and prayed. Leaders emerged who proved faithful and competent in not only taking part in the weekly discipleship time, but also in leading the group when we weren’t there .

 

As we finished up the initial creation to Christ stories, we moved into the ST4T Acts story set. We were fortunate that our story crafting project kept a step ahead of us throughout the course of this time. The Acts story set walks believers through the characteristics, life and ministry of the early church. With each story, the ST4T questions, which they were by this point comfortable in, would direct them to look at themselves in light of the book of Acts. With each story they adopted the principles and characteristics they saw into their own group. They identified as church, chose leaders from within, and began functioning as a local church. When questions arose, such as “how should we choose leaders?”, we looked deeper into scripture. We tried to take a backseat as much as possible in decision making, as we wanted to avoid a heavy influence of western church structure. While in the end, we believe this aided in the natural reproducibility of the ministry, at the time it was often laborious and frustrating!

 

Despite the ease we had in getting the groups to identify and function as “church,” the actual health and sustainability of the village churches was much more challenging. It never seemed to fail that if one of the churches was flourishing, another would begin floundering. Leaders would suffer moral failure, members would stop meeting, and believers were often so consumed with their physical burdens they would lose their passion and zeal for their new faith. With each village church, we went through a phase where we genuinely believed the church would altogether dissolve. However, whenever we found ourselves at the point of hopelessness, the Holy Spirit would spark something anew in the hurting and weak church bodies.

 

With our churches growing in maturity, our own team was growing, both in experience and in numbers. Stateside churches, national believers from our local town, and other missionaries joined our team as we partnered together in tending to these fragile new churches. Not only did this strengthen our resolve at a time when we were weary, it also allowed us to reach into two new areas with the Good News, eventually bringing our first generation churches up to five!