Church Planting

All the years since AMI was formed, I had heard the idea of church planting so often. And I can honestly say that I didn't fully understand why AMI chose to focus so much on planting churches as a means of doing missions. It's not that I didn't believe in it. It's just that I couldn't really see it. I had no basis to concretely put church planting as an important means to further the work of Jesus Christ's atoning sacrifice for the nations.

This past summer, I had the opportunity to go to a second summer missions trip with HMI. Three summers after my first trip to Cambodia and Thailand, I thought that this was the best time to go abroad once more to solidify a burden for missions work in Asia. We went to China not knowing what type of ministry that our team would be participating in and/or how everything would look like when we got to the field. But when we got there and got involved with the ministry that the local missionaries were participating in, especially the work in western China, the correlation of church planting and missions became clearer.

Where we stayed, there were no signs of a viable disciple-making indigenous community of believers. In a region where there are only a few hundred believers scattered among a population of ten million, the lack of a viable church became a stumbling block for at least a few people we met and shared the Gospel with. For them, their religious identity was tied in with their ethnic identity, that it was hard for them to accept the Truth. They had never met anyone in their own community who chose to believe in Jesus Christ, and therefore, they could not, in their conscience, choose to abandon what they had grown up with.

It is in this environment that missionaries we interacted with gave us a picture of what AMI had been reiterating over and over again. AMI's paradigm for missions work is to send out kingdom workers (foreign missionaries) to places in order to plant churches that'll raise up indigenous workers who can reach out to their own people group. I'm beginning to understand how church planting fits into the global perspective of missions, and perhaps this is how I will be involved in one form or another in participating in world missions, to be a part of a team of church planters who will go and start something.