What comes first — reformation or mission?

Here’s a piece from a longer email from Mike Shipman … I think he’s on to something.

It is my opinion that we should focus on facilitating change in the way churches do missions (local and distant). The fruit from the generational church breakthroughs causes churches to listen and makes them teachable (trainable). By all means, we should continue challenging churches to obey the Scripture through education programs. However, the game is changing now because movements are no longer theory. Where there are movements nearby, life in the Spirit and the demonstration of His power challenge the existing church by their actions to get involved.

Movements raise the faith-level of the church and change results.

Our experience in Indonesia has been that movements also lead the reformation of the church. In other words, when called people from the church begin radically obeying the Great Commission, resulting in movements, then those within the church who are genuinely seeking God through the Scripture will change. However, earlier efforts to change the existing church’s mindset were largely unfruitful, until there were local or regional movements.

In Indonesia we made the shift from “upper level strategizing” to practical training with accountability. We cast vision to a large number of people and trained them to do our CPM package. And then we “filtered up”, offering more training and mentoring for those who were obedient and experiencing fruit. We expected those who were trained to actually apply the method and also to train the method to others. In other words, we applied CPM principles to our training events (focus on the doers). It has resulted in multiple movements and an extensive training net stretched across our country of service. Because of the movements and increased fruitfulness that have resulted, now existing churches are reforming the way they do missions (local and distant).