Greg and Wendy Mann: January 2008
Dear Family and Friends,
Early this morning as I was going over my notes for our ministry training classes, I was struck by a powerful thought. Most of us can agree that the world needs the gospel. Most of us can also agree that planting indigenous churches is the key to success. By definition an indigenous church is self governing, self supporting, and self propagating. We hold these standards out to the missionary on the field, and we should. However, are we holding ourselves to the same standard on the "home front"? Here is the question, "can we say without hesitation that our American churches are indigenous? I don't believe we have a problem with being self supporting, but what about self governing and self propagating? As I understand the Bible, the leadership of the early church primarily came from men called out and trained from each local body. Our modern method, which is not entirely wrong, depends heavily upon bringing leaders in from the outside. For example, when we need a new pastor, likely we won't look within our own ranks because we have not developed and matured anyone to that point. On this issue of being self propagating, things get far more serious. How many churches in America reproduced themselves last year? How many even tried? Now, I know some that have. However the vast majority of churches did not reproduce themselves last year, and many of them never have. Do we really think we will reach the world by neglecting the responsibility to reproduce ourselves? Look at the exciting good news; imagine what would happen if 10,000, or 1,000, or even 100 churches determined to work toward reproducing themselves in the next 12 months! That would make our American (and Canadian) churches missionary churches once again, and we would be back in the book of Acts! Now, that is exciting stuff to think about!
Just a few thoughts from the jungle,
Greg Mann