Church Planting Movements
T4T and San Antonio
The Movement Church of San Antonio is part of a growing number of churches that aspire to be a “Church Planting Movement,” (CPM). One of the benefits of the CPM strategy is the fact that it’s not complicated. It operates under the conviction that churches should exist to plant more churches in order to “finish the task” of reaching all nations for Jesus Christ.
One of the most exciting things to arise from CPM in the last few years is the T4T strategy, or “Training for Trainers.” Ying Kai, a Chinese American missionary, developed this strategy after realizing his previous methodology could never establish enough churches to reach his growing city, let alone the whole nation of China.
After studying the New Testament with a fresh set of eyes, Kai arrived at three conclusions about what needed to change “to reach more people faster.” First, the principle behind the Great Commission is “Go” not “Come.” Secondly, the Gospel is for “all” not “some.” And finally, churches should “make disciples” (trainers) and not “church members.”
What Kai set out to do is really amazing when you think about it. He wanted to use the disciple-making strategy of Jesus to start a movement that would spread rapidly across an area of 20 million inhabitants. When the results of his efforts were finally tallied, 1.7 million new believers were baptized after a few short years. Many people believe this number to be overly conservative.
At the heart of T4T is the conviction that new believers can be taught in a very short period of time how to evangelize, study the Bible and even teach it to another new believer. Under this framework, a new Christian is not expected to mature for several years before he/she is encouraged to “train for trainers.” In fact, this happens immediately after someone embraces the faith.
We planted The Movement Church of San Antonio with the realization that Bexar County is very large and getting bigger by the minute. If someone were to build 2,000 new churches and fill them with an average size congregation of 250 people, we would reach less than half of the people who are far away from God.
This is the primary reason we are using the New Testament house church model to advance the kingdom. In the near future, we plan to gather our house churches in a corporate worship service, but our primary focus is to plant as many churches in homes as we can. We envision a network of house churches spread out all across our county.
If you are interested in what we are doing or in partnering with us, please send me an email. I would enjoy talking with you further about this. We can grab a cup of coffee or even do lunch together.
1. To see our “Discipleship Training Manual” click here.
2. To see the “The Seven Stories of Hope” click here.
3. To see the “The Seven Commands of Christ” click here.
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