Western Europe Church Planting Movement (Pt. 1)

The first CPM in the modern West

One of my goals in making this Substack was to get some docs out of my Google Drive and onto a website where it could be more easily accessed. Below is one of those documents.

It’s a case study of the first Church Planting Movement in the modern West. I believe I got it from Steve Smith some years ago. I’ve copied it verbatim except for a few headings I added for clarity. I enjoy reading it every so often and hope you learn from it as I have.

It’s a lengthy case study, so I’m going to break it up into two posts.

Western Europe Case Study

March 2017

• Size of the movement at this writing: about 500 house churches

• Status (Active/Plateaued/Fizzled) at writing: Active

Where are you on the CPM continuum?

5. CPM: Consistent multiple streams of 4th generation churches

Name of Focus Group

Majority people of a Western European country

Historical narrative of work among the group

Personal Background

When I was 15, I really searched for God with all my heart in my daily prayer times between 7:00 and 8:00 pm. Monday was my fasting day. At that time I experienced a calling, which even up to today feels very real.

I saw a map of my country with a lot of dots on the map, and from that day I started to share the gospel with my classmates. I invited them to come to church with me and read the Bible together and that’s what we did. In the first year about five or six friends from my class came to Christ.

That’s when I would say I started the first church ever. Some of them really got in trouble at home when they told their parents they wanted to be serious followers of Jesus. That’s how everything started.

A couple of years later, we experienced great openness, and for about two and a half years everything was possible. A few of my friends and I went to the headmaster in local schools in the neighboring villages and towns and we asked to share about Christ. I was in my late teens and my friends were about the same age.

And we really taught about Christ to whole schools. And on weekends in those villages we did a youth service and some youth activities to get them together.

After a couple of years, the situation started to change and new regulations and laws came in. That’s when I hit the biggest identity crisis in my life. Because all the things that had worked before didn’t work anymore. I was finished with high school and hadn’t decided what to do with my life.

The only thing I really wanted to do at that time was to serve the Lord and continue what I had been doing. I had been traveling around the country trying to look for (what I call now) someone to disciple me.

I met a lot of amazing people, but they all wanted me to join their Bible schools and ministries. I never heard anybody say, “Wow, this is what you have started? Can I come and visit you? I would like to see it; I would like to see how to develop it.” So I was really frustrated.

I didn’t know any better, so I went to study theology at a liberal theological university. It didn’t help me much. For four years I disappeared. I stopped going to church; I stopped praying. I stopped reaching out; I stopped pretty much everything.

After that I was so disillusioned that I took the first job I could find, in an English-speaking country. Then, after a couple of years, I moved to Asia in 1996. I started attending a church because I met a Christian who told me if I wanted to learn the language I’d do better going to a church than a Buddhist temple.

CPM Awakening

I ended up attending a church that was part of the most dynamic church planting movement in the country: very charismatic, very Asian, very hierarchical, very authoritarian. For me, that was the perfect place.

After one year, I heard Jesus say very clearly, “When you were 15 I called you. The calling is still on. You ran away; I haven’t changed my mind.” That evening I knew I had to go back to God.

The next morning I told one of the church leaders about it and he said, “OK, I’m going to train you.” So from day one he took me out evangelizing. He taught me Bible all day and took me out in the countryside for church planting. They took me into their life; I lived together with one couple for one year.

They challenged me to start an international church with all the sex tourists and Westerners who had come to study Buddhism. That was how I really restarted. It was like learning to love again. After only a couple of months it was very clear: I’m going to stay here for a bit longer to learn, but after that I have to go back to my home country.

Back Home

I knew I wanted to start a church planting movement, with strong discipleship and unbelievers coming to Christ. So I came back to my country in 1999. I knew exactly one person in the city where I started.

The only people committed to this vision were myself and an Asian woman who worked at the embassy as a diplomat. She supported me and opened her nice flat for meetings. We started reaching out from day one. I was reaching out everywhere, and she reached out to embassy people, wherever she met them.

I deliberately kept myself outside the traditional Christian scene and in the beginning only shared with people who had grown up outside the church. It was the subculture I was most used to. But it also really felt like that’s what I should be doing. I should provide an environment where new believers can grow up first.

After three months, we really had a breakthrough. The first couple came to Christ. Our country is not an easy place to evangelize. But it happened and God spoke directly into people’s lives.

For example, we had invited one lady for coffee and she was making fun of us when she left. She went to the subway and then called us three hours later and said, “I don’t know what you guys did, but when I was standing at the traffic light, I suddenly knew everything you guys had said was true. God is real and I have to change my life.”

So we visited her the same evening and baptized her about a week later. Those kinds of things happened and I’m not sure where I would have been if that period hadn’t happened. (I can testify that even up until today it can happen everywhere and the Holy Spirit moves everywhere and people are touched.)

That was in early 2000; there were a couple of baptisms and things looked good. We had started a Sunday service right from the beginning. It looked absolutely unprofessional, but all these new believers thought, “Something special is happening with us,” so they brought their friends along.

I probably would have continued down that road, but a couple of things happened. First, we were discipling on a one to one level. Up to today I say: “If somebody new comes to Christ, please try to really meet them every week for at least an hour – to pray to study the word of God, to help them get their life in order. Everything on top of that is bonus. But show them their own importance by meeting them one on one and helping them to understand they should be doing the same thing with people behind them.”

We’ve always done that, starting year one and we’ve never stopped. So my schedule quickly filled up with the discipleship and I couldn’t reach out much anymore. Also, there were no mature Christians involved, and all our new believers had limits in discipling the new people. So I would do it differently now, but I wouldn’t compromise the one on one interaction, the very personal touch.

Nowadays I give leaders a different perspective. I ask: “Who behind you is already reaching out to others? Who behind you just needs help in the beginning?”

In the beginning my focus was very much on church growth. Very little on how Jesus can help people get free, be delivered, and get routines in their lives? So nowadays, I say: “Focus on the very strongest and on the very weakest.”

Take the strongest together and take the weakest together. But don’t burden new leaders with all the people who have problems. With the weakest – those who really need help – try to find different patterns.

Take them together for breakfast once a week and use the time to really pray. Talk about problems and pray with them. But don’t burden your next generation leaders too much with them.

First House Church

Also, pretty quickly, the first of our new guys got admission to a university in a different town. He said, “We can do everything that we have seen. We can reach out, we can disciple, but we cannot start a Sunday service.”

So I realized very quickly, already in 2000-2001, that if we went with a Sunday service, it wouldn’t work. It would be too slow. Then one of my friends said, “If you ever make me preach on a Sunday, I will leave. I cannot do that.” He has changed his mind now, but that helped me realized that a Sunday service with preaching was not the model to use.

So we started to communicate very clearly way back then: “We will not start Sunday services. We will start communities. We will start house churches.” But (something else I would now do differently), we kept dabbling with a Sunday service for a very long time. Too long.

The ministry grew step by step. There was no money involved at all. There were no missionary funds and no “missions” money from our own people. At the beginning they were all new believers from an atheistic background. We were all working, trying to work as little as possible to have enough time.

But that was also part of what we really wanted to see. I taught them: “If you want to see a church planting movement, we have to set the pattern first. We have to be able to do it contrary to the normal church pattern here. So of course our time was incredibly limited.

I got married in 2003 and we had our first child in 2005. That didn’t help me have more time; that was definitely a reason to slow down.

Another reason the growth slowed down for a while: our first generation of believers were very excited, hard-working people. The next generation, who came to Christ through them, were more dependent on help.

They saw a community of believers – a community that was warm and loving – and felt: “that’s a good group to be part of.” It took us some years to get a good balance inbetween really helping people press forward, and taking care of all the others. In the beginning we didn’t know how to do that.

Right from the beginning though (in 2001), we started first generation groups in two or three other places in our country. From that time on I met with all of them together once a quarter in one of the major cities. We prayed and I taught a lot (more than I would now).

For one thing, some biblical foundation was necessary, but at the same time, I didn’t know what else to do besides teaching, teaching, and more teaching. They learned a lot and the friendships were quite close. There were constant breakthroughs; people were always coming to Christ. But it took much longer than I had expected.

I thought the growth would continue explosively, as it had at the beginning. But that wasn’t how it happened.

Slow Down

In 2003, after experiencing the slow-down in growth, I started to pray and fast a lot. By 2004, we had twelve or thirteen house churches. I felt it was time to establish a more stable leadership team for the whole country. I had a short list of brothers I felt would be good for that, and out of that list, I put together a team of nine (later ten) people to start to lead the work.

We didn’t know how to be a team together, but those were the people I felt God had given me. So for two years we tried to form as a leadership team. I felt in my spirit: “It’s not good to just continue to just go and go and go forward. We have to establish a level of stability to be crazy enough to reach out and take the next steps of expansion.”

It took about two years for us to start functioning as a team. I heard God say very clearly: “You always wanted to go into every county, every city, every subculture in this country. Now it’s time to move again. Divide the country into eight regions, and in those regions where you haven’t started any house church yet, go in and begin to pioneer.”

At that time we were not as dynamic as we are now. We didn’t even know what to do. It took us one year to reshape our mindset and just get in the car in the morning, pray and go to another city and just go out in the street and start talking with people. During the first year we were more trying to challenge the more experienced guys to move into some of those areas of the country.

We did that from 2007 to 2010.

In 2008 I got trained in an established pattern for evangelism, it helped us a lot in the years since then. We learned how to share with people anywhere, how to get to know people anywhere, and mentor people anywhere. We learned how to do it through telephone, through Skype, to just do it anywhere, wherever you find somebody willing to come to Christ and accept Jesus and start to be a disciple.

That was when it became clear: now it’s time for three of us to go full-time, to help the apostolic work to grow. That was not possible part-time any more. In 2008 I started traveling extensively. At that time my wife was pregnant with our second child.

But she released me a lot; I traveled every week. And we saw a major breakthrough: once a year, every Pentecost, we all came together and it was still small at that time: 200-250 people. But we came together and you could see the atmosphere change. There was a new excitement in the whole thing.

This is the end of Part 1. I will post Part 2 later this month!

• Want to learn more about Movements in America? —> Get The Book

• Sign up to pray for my ministry! —> Pray

• Donate to support my work —> Donate