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One Year Challenge

Category Archives: Church Planting

Disciples Today Releases Global Missions Report

31 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by OYC in Church Planting, Numbers

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This a monumental effort published by Grounded Resources is now available online from Disciples Today. Download it, read it and share with others!

Humble Church Plantings

27 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by OYC in Church Planting, Posts

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Missionary work will eventually lead to church plantings, but there are good ways to plant churches and bad ways to plant churches. Ed Stetzer’s article on three church planing practices that must die is insightful and cutting.

Specifically he asks us when thinking about planting a church: “What difference does my church plant make in this community and in the world?” Here are his three main points:

First, we need to stop the sort of messaging that communicates (implicitly or explicitly) that all other churches are really bad and ours is the best.

Second, we should stop offering a completely weekend-centric ministry (if that is what we currently do).

Third, we must never plant churches simply to meet the niche needs of Christians.

Read the whole thing.

How to Get Ready Financially for a OYC

03 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by OYC in Campus Ministry, Church Planting

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hand holding dollar bills

If you’ve already registered for the One Year Challenge, one of the questions you were asked was whether you could support yourself or need the church to provide financial support for you.

Some churches do have the financial resources to provide housing or even a salaried internship, but…

Most volunteers at most sites are self-supporting. They are following a great tradition of men like Paul who made tents to support himself and his co-workers on the mission.

Here are some practical ideas for preparing yourself financially:

  1. Talk about money with the leaders at various sites. In many places it will be fairly easy for you to find a job. In some countries, there may be restrictions on what jobs foreigners can hold. In campus towns, some have abundant employment opportunities, some don’t. Ask!
  2. Know your total debt amount, not just your monthly payments.
  3. Improve your earning power with additional experience or certifications. For example, if you want to support yourself as a teacher (a popular option!) you could get an online certification in teaching English as a second language. Many good companies offer these programs. We know several OYC volunteers who have completed the least expensive program at i-to-i, but there are many other excellent options like this, too.
  4. If possible, don’t get into long-term financial obligations (such as financing a car or buying things with a credit card).
  5. If you are a student, be very careful about accepting lots of financial aid with the promise that you don’t have to make payments until six months after you graduate. Many students have no idea how much debt they are accumulating or how constraining it will be on their future choices. Pay as you go, as much as possible.
  6. Mostly, get input from wise advisers who have their own finances in order.

Update from Fairbanks, Alaska

06 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by OYC in Church Planting

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Disciples Today has the scoop:

The Great Land Christian Church – Fairbanks, just planted in September 2015, has been working hard to reach people and help them to get to know God in new and exciting ways. And God has certainly blessed our efforts.

Starting with a mission team of 14 people, the church has been steadily growing. God has added seven disciples in the first seven months, and more currently studying the Bible!

Read the whole report.

Mark Dever on Disciple Making

03 Friday Jun 2016

Posted by OYC in Campus Ministry, Church Planting, Posts

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Mark Dever, author of Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, outlines the basics of disciple-making: teach, correct, model and love.

Helping others follow Jesus cannot be done without risk. Just as you have to humble yourself to be discipled, so you have to humble yourself to disciple. Discipling involves difficult things—saying no, persevering through troubles, knowing when to bear with someone, and doing it. Your invitations might be spurned, your counsel rejected. We disciple not just through our strength, but through our weakness.

This article is a great resource for a discipling time with a young leader or for a class.

Read the whole thing.

Podcast with David Morrow

30 Monday May 2016

Posted by OYC in Campus Ministry, Church Planting

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If you have read Why Men Hate Going to Church or have wondered why, when you walk into almost any church there are more women than men, you’ll enjoy listening to this podcast with David Murrow.

One of the most interesting insights for me:

“Women do masculine, but men don’t do feminine.”

Which is Better? One Megachurch or 100 Small Churches

27 Sunday Mar 2016

Posted by OYC in Church Planting

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It’s not just a academic question. It really goes to the heart of what we should be pouring our resources into, and what kind of leaders we should be training.

Karl Vaters offers some good analysis:

Instead of comparing roses to redwoods, I’d like to propose a way to compare apples to apples without participating in the “who’s better?” game.

How about these two questions, side-by-side: What are the benefits of 10,000 people worshiping in a megachurch led by one pastor? What are the benefits of 10,000 people worshiping in 100 small churches led by 100 pastors?

Now that’s apples to apples.

Read the whole thing.

Mistakes Church Planters Make

25 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by OYC in Church Planting

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Though not from our fellowship of churches, we can learn from others who have experience in things like church planting. Not all their lessons apply to us, but these seem worthy of consideration.

Two big mistakes:

1. Launch with a handful of people in a living room. If that worked for Bill Hybels and Rick Warren, it’ll work for me.

Truth: Nope. It most likely won’t. Hybels and Warren are outliers from a past generation. Decades of evidence and research consistently shows that churches with a launch team of under fifty people will struggle to ever gain viability, sustainability, and momentum….

2. Build a decent launch team but rely on advertising to bring in launch day guests.

Truth: Far too many dollars have been wasted on direct mailers and billboards by new church plants….A person who visits based on a direct mailer is less likely to return than a person invited by a launch team member.

Read the whole thing for ten positive things to do.

Small Churches are Crucial to World Evangelism

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by OYC in Church Planting

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Karl Vaters appreciates the big churches:

Big and megachurches are great. And they get almost all the press, both positive and negative. They deserve our prayers and support, not jealousy and ridicule.

…but insists we need the small ones, too, to get the job done:

But, as valuable as they are, large congregations are not where most people receive the bulk of their spiritual nourishment and discipleship. Most of that is happening in millions of small congregations all over the world.

But the most interesting part of the article is this pointer to a little-understood research finding.

Churches in the smallest size category (under 100 in attendance) had won an average of 32 new people over the past five years; churches with 100-200 in worship also won 32; churches between 200-300 average 39 new individuals; churches between 300-400 won 25.

Most church leaders know that big churches don’t grow as fast as small churches. This is because of simple group dynamics. If you are looking at percentages, no one should compare big church to small church growth. We all know small churches grow faster on a percent-growth basis.

And it doesn’t matter. It’s not useful information. If a young married couple has a baby, they grow their family population by 50% No one is worried about the effect on world population. For people who care about world evangelism, small-church/high-growth stories are kind of a yawner, a dog-bites-man story.

But this matters: small churches don’t just make more disciples on a percentage basis. They make more disciples, period. There are far more of them, and they practically do the same work of converting people–people, count ’em, not percentages–as larger churches. Again:

Churches in the smallest size category (under 100 in attendance) had won an average of 32 new people over the past five years; churches with 100-200 in worship also won 32; churches between 200-300 average 39 new individuals; churches between 300-400 won 25.

The solution is not making the smaller churches into large churches. It’s making many, many more small churches, all the while thanking God for those few exceptions who by the rare circumstances or gifted leaders become large.

The Unfinished Task: The Caribbean

11 Friday Mar 2016

Posted by OYC in Church Planting, Countries of the World, Images

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From the standpoint of the International Churches of Christ, the Caribbean region is relatively under-evangelized. On a per-population basis, there are about half as many members in the 30 or so countries and territories that make up this region:

Unfinished Task

May God send workers into the Caribbean harvest fields! There’s much still to be done.

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