5 Lessons from Trevor’s Story
Here’s what Trevor’s story taught me.
1. Begin where you are
Trevor got his start when he was at seminary among Cambodians who had fled the murderous Pol Pot regime of Cambodia. The Khmer Rogue had killed anyone with an education. These refugees were simple-minded village people. Or at least that’s what they appeared to be.
These new believers were uneducated but smart, resourceful and committed. They were deep in their understanding of the Scriptures and actively engaged in making disciples. Lacking formal education they made good church planters. Working among immigrants gave Trevor his heart for Asia.
Eventually, he found his way to Asia as a professor at a seminary with a difference. Students spent the week in classes and the weekends out sharing the gospel, making disciples and planting churches. To graduate you had to plant a church with twenty-five baptized new disciples.
Trevor became a mentor to the students as they faced challenges in planting churches in a Muslim nation. As they wrestled with the roadblocks, Trevor watched and learned.
2. Move towards the gaps then watch and learn
He soon noticed a gap in the church planting strategy. They were making progress among the majority population, but not among unreached people groups (UPGs).
So he set up a mission organization to target the gaps and recruited students to go after them. He hired students to do two-week cultural surveys of the UPGs and filtered them based on their behavior. He was looking for people who were better at evangelism and disciple making than he was.
From that pool, he selected four students and sent them out to hard places and hard people groups to reach. One of the students objected, “But we don’t know anything!” Trevor replied, “When you learn something let me know.”
In the early days, a breakthrough was one or two new disciples from an UPG.
The students tracked the breakthroughs and identified fruitful practices.
They discovered that offering prayer was an effective way of connecting with people.
The Islamic leaders would write out Quranic verses on paper, pray them and then burn them and give the ashes to the person to drink.
One church planting couple tried writing out Scriptures and praying them over a glass of water. The person drank the glass and was healed. They modified a cultural norm and added Biblical content.
The planters discovered that praying the Bible over the sick resulted in an open door for evangelism that led to discipleship. What they were seeing in the field was matching patterns in the Gospels and Acts.
Another effective approach they discovered was to ask Muslims, and even religious teachers, “Have you ever experienced God?” Culturally, it was a strange question to ask. They’d answere, “No” and then reply, “How do you experience God?”
They wanted to know how to experience God in the everyday challenges of life. When they faced illness or demonic oppression, they had nowhere to turn.
An encounter with God in Jesus’ name was a far more effective starting place than an antagonistic debate. They become convinced that somehow Jesus is Lord and then go on a journey to understand what that means.
3. Follow that relationship!
Another lesson they learned was reaching groups, not just individuals.
One of the workers was the first to get to three discipleship groups. He was convinced the most effective method was to disciple individuals, partly from security concerns. Other workers went after groups of people. Their progress was slower, but after six months, they began to reproduce while the one-on-one guy never went beyond three and had dropped back to just two groups.
Trevor discovered in this culture people don’t do things one-on-one and secretly. If it’s secret and private it’s considered shameful.
From that point they decided, to target groups. For instance, the young men eating boiled peanuts in the cool of the evening while they strummed their guitars and sang. They trained the disciples to talk about the gospel in natural groupings of people whether they were friends or relatives.
Discipleship and church planting begins with those gatherings of people discussing the Bible together.
Trevor says the book of Acts uses the word “ecclesia” three ways: the small gathering in homes, the church across the city and the church throughout a region. We need each form of church.
4. If it’s fruitful, keep going
We created an experimental culture. The experiments had to be low-cost and low-risk. They would set them up and then watch and learn.
For instance, they had a twelve-month program for training workers. We had good trainers and selected the best candidates, none of which worked out. It wasn’t fruitful. But they were invested in that program and Trevor was reluctant to end it.
Then one of the local leaders came to him and said, “We need to shut this down, it’s not fruitful. Our purpose was not to run trainings but find the right people.”
He wanted to replace four months of training with just one or two days of training.
So he went to a strong missions church of 400 with a heart to reach Muslims. He asked them to pick 10% of the church most likely to reach Muslims. Then he gave them just one day of training.
Out of the 40 he trained, he found just four who took the training and applied it in the field over the next few months. They kept reporting in and asking for more coaching. Now he’d found the right people, and began training them as they reached Muslims.
Across twenty churches, in every case the total number of Muslims reached and discipled is more than the original size of the sending church. If the church was 400, there would be more than 400 in the underground churches.
They learned the purpose of training is not training but to find the right people and apprentice them in the field.
5. You can have your cake and eat it too
Trevor said, We often hear, “We want quality not quantity”. Show me the verse that says we don’t want quantity. The book of Acts reports on quantity and quality.
I grew up on a farm, I never heard an apple grower say, “I want quality not quantity.” I never heard a dairy farmer say, “I want quality but not quantity.” No farmer says that.
They all want both. They know quality and quantity are related symbiotically.
That’s why we’ve made such good progress towards a multiplying movement of disciples and churches. But I'm not going to discuss the numbers. But it has been a surprise.
Almost every quarter when the counts come in, I have to cry, I have to weep about what God's been doing.
