A Church Planting Movement is a Leadership Movement

So you've broken through and you're beginning to connect with people, share the gospel and train disciples. You may be tempted to camp there for a while. I was. After all, you're finally seeing fruit. People are coming to faith and going on to discipleship.

Now you are ready for a new challenge—multiplying workers. While you keep making disciples, you've got to begin mobilising others or you'll never see a disciple making movement.

Stan Parks says,

A Church-Planting Movement (CPM) is . . . a church leadership multiplication and development movement. The difference between planting churches and seeing sustained movements is usually linked to leadership development. No matter how many churches are planted, unless the cultural insiders become leaders, the churches will remain foreign and either reproduce slowly or reach a plateau when the initial leader(s) become overloaded.

Stan explains how leadership development starts from the beginning. The way evangelism, discipleship, and church formation is done IS leadership development and sets the stage for on-going leadership development.

What does that look like? You'll have to read the article to find out. Here are the main points:

• Vision: visionary leadership
• Prayer: prayer is the foundation for fruitfulness (John 14:13-14)
• Training: everyone is trained
• Bible: The training manual is the Bible
• Obedience: obedience-based (John 14:15)
• Strategy: the Gospels and Acts provide the main strategy and models
• Empowerment: people become leaders by leading
• Biblical: biblical standards for leadership
• Unbiased: focus on the fruitful (Matthew 13:1-18)
• Shared: multiple leaders (Acts 13:1)
• Churches: focus on new churches

If you find it helpful, get together with some other practitioners and talk about how you'll practice what Stan preaches.