Become a cross cultural church planter
Be a church planter
The journey
The journey is a training process that has been designed to help you be an effective cross cultural missionary. You begin the journey while in your sending church and continue through preparation and then while on the field
Journey introduction
criteria for starting
ej = explorer on the journey
- home church leadership agrees to ej embarking on the journey
- ej interested in long-term (that is: planning to be overseas longer than 18 months)
- ej at least 18 years of age
- ej & church leadership accept WEC's objectives and statement of faith
- ej interested in being involved in cross-cultural church planting, even if planning to be in a support role
Journey Team training is just-in-time training delivered by reflective practitioners in cross-cultural church planting to trainees who are in a ministry context.
It is designed according to adult education and missiological principles and is intentionally reproducible.
For all its idealism in design and delivery, it exists for one purpose only: to see churches multiplying among people groups who are currently without the opportunity to hear about Jesus.
It will soon be possible to earn an Australian Government-accredited Cert IV and Diploma in Cross-Cultural Church Planting through the process - but these are only bits of paper. What really counts are people meeting Jesus - people who otherwise will never know that he died so that they can live with him for eternity.
Preparing to be a cross cultural church planter
interaction with the journey team
While doing initial preparation in the home church, the ej and his/her church is warmly invited to interact with the Journey Team learning community. This includes a number of activities including seminars, meetings, other get-togethers, opportunities for hands-on involvement in cross-cultural church planting and more focused study or skill development.
Any ej or member of their home church is warmly invited to visit us in western Sydney at any time, or to participate in any activity Journey Team members are involved in.
preparation in the home church
Initial preparation for cross-cultural church planting is essentially the same as for training for Christian leadership in your own culture. The best place to do this is in the context of your local church among the people who know you best. The things that need to be covered are:
- reading the whole Bible
- growing in maturity and responsibility so that your church leadership would be happy to have you in leadership in the church (agreeing that you fulfil the Timothy and Titus criteria for leadership)
- developing a vital spiritual walk
- gaining experience in evangelism and discipleship
- determining where you believe God is calling you to go and having this call tested and affirmed by your home church leadership
There are many different ways that the above things can be achieved. Each church and denomination may do it differently. How it is done is not important. What is important is that your home church leadership is sure that you have fulfilled the criteria and are therefore ready to move onto the next step.
Ready to go
learning objectives
- Prepares and puts into practice a beginning cross-cultural church planting strategy Outlines the principles of cross-cultural church planting
- Researches and describes aspects of another culture using ethnographic methods
- Articulates the key challenges of cross-cultural communication
- Responds appropriately to a given range of different cross-cultural experiences
- Works effectively in a multicultural church planting Team
- Articulates a Christian response to the beliefs and practices of different cultures
This is ten weeks of hands-on training in cross-cultural church planting in western Sydney among unreached people groups. This is designed to be done just before you are ready to get on the plane to go overseas. As well as becoming part of a multicultural church planting team and learning the initial processes of church planting as a team, there is the added benefit of learning about a number of other issues that you will face as you move into another culture.
Members of your home church are most welcome to join in for all or part of the time.
learning language and culture
To be effective as a church planter among people from another culture it is essential to become both proficient and fluent in their language. For most people, depending on the difficulty of the language, this will take one to three years of full time study. But learning the language is not sufficient. Language is inseparable from culture and if we are ever to truly understand and to communicate effectively we need to go deep into the culture. Ejs on the journey go through a guided anthropological study which helps this learning process, usually with the help and supervision of an experienced worker on the field and interaction with peers who are also going through the same process.
Church planting on the field
The ej joins the church planters' community forum and is able to interact with other cross-cultural church planters working in different places around the world.
When ready they also attend three seminars which help to prepare a relevant, contextualized gospel, form of church, church planting strategy and discipleship and leadership training.
The in-depth study of the culture now provides a starting point for an evaluative process of preparing a contextualized theology and gospel presentations and for designing a relevant, reproducible strategy for effective church planting.
The greatest mistake a cross-cultural church planter can make is to assume that "the way we do it at home" is the only or even best way of thinking and doing church.
The Truth (who is Jesus) doesn't change, but we all wear our own cultural glasses and need to meet Him in an authentic relationship. Our role as cross-cultural church planters is to introduce Jesus, not a foreign Christian religion. Our function is as temporary, catalytic agents starting reproducing, authentic, faith communities whose focus is Jesus. We move on, but Jesus remains - hopefully without too many foreign artifacts and additives.
Learning community
This site will be where we post papers, articles or other resources which we prepare on the questions we are grappling with.
This will provide an opportunity for others to build on what we are learning and to interact with us about different ideas and experiences.
Visit the learning community
The Journey Team is a focused, missiological learning community. We learn by study, doing and reflecting on what we do - and we learn communally by interacting with each other about the things we are reading and experiencing.
If you would like to come, or learn more about this learning community, contact richard.jenner [at] wec [dot] com [dot] au.