Audio Transcript:

Welcome to Missions on Point, the Propempo perspective on church and missions. Welcome. You've joined us for episode 210 of Missions on Point. We're in a series on church planting. Today's episode deals with foreign culture concerns. Note, this episode is not about planting English churches in foreign countries. I could spend many episodes on cross-cultural church planting in foreign countries. It's been my experience personally, but also in consulting and training church planters in many places around the world, especially those that are more difficult countries to work in. We're going to distill a lot of ideas about foreign culture concerns here in three major topics. First, all the issues of church planting come to bear in foreign cross-culture church planting. Second, special considerations for foreign cross-culture concerns. And third, the resulting local church reproducing itself. So let's go back and talk about the first one. All the issues of church planting come to bear in foreign cross-culture church planting.

It's an interesting thought to realize that all church planting for all concerns is kind of reverse engineered from cross-cultural church planting in a foreign country or culture. Not all foreign culture concerns are involved in every type and opportunity of church planting, both near and far. It does provide the framework for consideration for all kinds of church planting. Here are some of the things specific to foreign cross-culture church planting.

First, in my mind is that it is a necessity for church planting among all nations in order to fulfill the great commission. So every church needs to consider and think about how is our church going to be plugged in to help fulfill the great commission. That includes church planting among all nations. So secondly then, the normative plan of God for local churches is to do this. I said this at the beginning of the whole series. It's normal for local churches to think about church planting and commit to doing church planting. The cross-cultural church planting effort in a foreign country has to wrestle with distinguishing what is timeless from what is temporal, what they take from their own culture and expectations and ideals. How does that translate into the new culture that you're going to?

There's also the issue of legal presence or platform for being there. In many countries, in order to reach the last of the unreached, it may require that those workers who are doing the church planting have to have a legal presence or platform just for being in the country to do the church planting that they want to do. Often, that means a form of business as missions. So the church planters may need to have contracts for employment in that country, or they have to create a business of their own and do it well.

Another item is that they have to identify the causal factor. Is it the initiative of the mission agency? Is it the initiative of the individual who feels particularly moved or called to the opportunity for church planting in that people group? Is it a request from the people group themselves asking for a missionary worker to come and plant a church there? Is it in partnership with an affiliation of churches that wants to see a church planted in this otherwise unreached area? Or is it completely independent of others in the equation and it's just a specific independent initiative to go do this thing?

Another issue we're looking at is all the things having to do with pre-launch we've covered in some other episodes. Who was on the team? Who's involved as members of the church planting team? What kind of training needs to be done beforehand? What about the timing and location of the church plant? All of those may have a lot of variables to coordinate together in order to identify the specific time and place and pre-launch training and team that is required in order to have a sound church planting effort.

And then last but not least in all of these issues is language and culture. Some foreign cross-culture church plants have an option of which language to use for the church plant itself and presumably for what language is used in worship and church life as the church is planted. Understanding, discerning, and applying the right language and culture decisions will be a big part of ensuring that the church plant will actually take place and be long-term successful in human terms. The second major issue we're going to talk about is special considerations for foreign cross-culture concerns. The first of this follows up on language and culture. Language proficiency and using an indigenous language Bible. We want to make sure that the target population actually understands whether it is using a trade language or an indigenous native tribal type language, and do they have an indigenous language Bible available for to use?

It may be in process. It may be that the church planters have to take years of time to develop an indigenous language Bible along with translation consultants and all the things that go with Bible translation. This is no small matter because we want to make sure that we have gospel clarity. That is that the gospel is clearly understood with nothing left out, that it is a biblical gospel with the right kind of definitions of what comprises the message of the gospel. In addition, all of the teaching of the doctrines of salvation and of the church should be Bible-focused. The Bible is the authority. When the missionary church planter works in that people group, he or she or the team need to be very clear that the Bible is the authority. And then in addition, we need to have worship resources and styles that are appropriate to the target cross-culture church plants.

We had to consciously work on this in the tribal group where we saw God plant churches. There was one church, actually a small group of churches, a long way away from us that had been kind of invaded by an outside religious group and told that they had to do praise and worship, meaning they had to use the English words, praise and worship, and follow the pattern of an English style of worship imported into their church in order to be biblical, which is crazy. The local cross-cultural church should not have to use English terms for anything or follow any English pattern. So we went out to that village group and pulled them all together and explained from the scriptures in their own language about worship again and show them how they can confidently worship God perfectly in biblical harmony with the doctrines of the church and in their own language without adopting some foreign style.

After language proficiency and using an indigenous language Bible, think about indigeneity issues. If you followed Missions on Point podcast, you know this term, indigeneity, is one that is precious to us because it is so significant and important in having a really solid church plant among the target native people. The first practical element of indigeneity is to make sure that as your target people are coming to repentance and faith in Christ alone for their salvation, that they are involved in telling this great gospel story of Jesus to others. Evangelism and discipleship needs to be consistent, central, and continuous among the people that are hearing the gospel and growing in faith in Christ. This is core to the great commission, evangelism and discipleship, consistent, central, and continuous.

The second thing is early and ongoing financial considerations. It is so easy for the foreign missionary to overshadow or eclipse the financial abilities of the local people. First of all, local people, if they've never had a church there before, are not used to giving anything to church ministries. One of the positive results of becoming a Christian in our tribal group was the people who depended on subsistence living as farmers and animal husbandry didn't have to give of their crops and their animals to a local pagan priest or shaman. They actually became a little bit more affluent because they weren't being soaked by the local pagan priest for more stuff to try to set up an omen or to discern what demon or bad behavior was causing their problems or illness.

Naturally, they were so grateful to the Lord Jesus for coming to pay for their sins and to save them that they wanted to be generous to support the ministry in any way they could, with beans and rice and corn and sweet potatoes and sometimes animals. A corollary to this is that outside funding is poison to the growth of the church. For the foreign missionary to be a generous giver or a conduit for generous Western funding for the church will destroy the fellowship of that church, and doing so breaks the process of indigeneity and makes that church or those Christians dependent on outside funding. It's not a good thing.

The other indigeneity issue has to do with leadership development and utilization of these new growing leaders. From early in the development of the church, as people are being saved and coming together to worship together on a weekly basis, there needs to be a plan for developing leaders from within that group. I think there's something desperately wrong with a church plant that is almost entirely dependent on the foreign missionary for leadership. So this idea rolls over into another nugget of consideration, and that is church formation defined. You want to have biblical church membership, which means that those who are accepted as members of the church are not members simply because they attend, but they're members because they're believers. They have a verifiable testimony of salvation in repenting and coming to faith in Christ alone. They're depending on Christ and the authority of scripture and the church to nurture and grow their young faith.

Real church membership is based on regeneration and not simply attendance or following some rules. Then we also want to have biblically qualified plurality of leaders. I strongly believe that the New Testament model is that there be a plurality of leaders. That solves so many problems culturally and practically in the ongoing development and strength of a solid local indigenous church. But those leaders need to be biblically qualified, which probably means that the missionary has to give attention to teaching and training and giving experience that proves the biblical qualifications according to 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. Then church formation defined also means local ownership of ongoing church life and development. That is the local biblically qualified leaders and the church members actually take ownership of continuing on whether or not the missionary is present. Our indigenous tribal church association actually defined a church to be recognized as a complete church as having a plurality of elders, 25 baptized believers from more than two families.

We said, why the more than two families and why 25? They said, then we know that it can actually be self-supporting, and it's not dominated by political infighting between only two families. That's how they defined it for themselves. The third major concern is the resulting local church reproducing itself. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here. The way that happens is encouraging the church to plant another church beyond them in an area that needs that kind of ministry and outreach. In other words, it's a little bit too far for that village to come to their church, so they have persistent outreach to that area until they have enough believers to start meeting as a church. Then they train leaders there so that leaders are identified from the original church to keep on going to the new church area and develop leaders among that group.

Finally, they're recognized and there is an equality in fellowship between the planted church of their tribal group and the mother church, if you will. When that happens in today's terms, it's called a church planting movement. But as I've described here, this church planting movement has such stronger foundation and footing biblically, doctrinally in leadership, in the Gospel than many so-called church planting movements that are out there in the world today. I would encourage you to tune in again next week for the last episode in this series, rounding out the series on church planting on Seeds of the Future.

Thanks for joining us today on Missions on Point. We trust that you'll find more help and resources on our websites at Propempo.com and MissioSERVE.org. We are so thankful for those who support us, enabling us to produce this podcast. Now to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen.