Church Planting Movements – How to Avoid Them!

Perhaps even more important than what believers do in Church Planting Movements is what they do not do. Garrison lists the following as obstacles, practices that will impede the startup of a CPM or eventually destroy a CPM in progress:

• Place non-biblical requirements (land, building, paid staff, legal documents, minimum number of believers, etc.) on new churches.

• Make new churches abandon their local language, culture, dress, music, art forms, and the like to conform to outside standards.

• Encourage new believers to start imitating the worldliness, immorality, and bad behavior of other so-called Christians in their community.

• Use models of churches (expensive buildings and labor-intensive programs) that require outside resources, staffing, and funding to maintain.

• Use lots of outside funding and keep new believers and churches dependent on it.

• Put extra-biblical requirements on leaders like theological school or extensive training programs before they can do ministry.

• Make sure everything happens in sequential order. Never consider, for example, that the discipleship process may actually start before conversion to Christ.

• Plant sterile churches. Do not expect reproduction to take place and somehow convey it is unusual for believers and churches to want to multiply.

• Make sure you have a pre-fabricated strategy for church planting in place in order to avoid flexibility and dependence of the Spirit’s leading.