Reaching the world's great cities

I didn't make the Exponential conference this year. But Dave Ferguson did.

Here's his summary of Redeemer's strategy for international church planting.

1. Target key international cities. Tim Keller believes that the key cities in the world today are New York, London, Hong Kong. However, he said that Hong Kong will soon be replaced in the east by Dubai and Shanghai. (I'm sure Chicago is also in that category, he just assumed I knew that!)

2. Don't send a church planter to those cities, go to those cities to find a church planter. I found this fascinating and counter-intuitive. Most church planting organizations or church planting churches send church planters into new context; but Redeemer's strategy is to send some of their people to these cities who will search for the best church planters in that context already.

3. Provide training and money. Tim said that when they first approach potential church planters in these international settings they don't believe them or think it is some kind of bait and switch. But once trust is earned this is the best way to attract church planters; to improve quality of the church plant and ensure that it still has the proper DNA.

A final comment from Dave:

While Tim Keller and Redeemer are all about reproducing sites (they have 3) and church plants (helped start more than 100) my favorite quote of the night from Keller was this warning about the reproducing church: “cell reproduction without a purpose is called cancer.”