CPM - What is it?

OK, so I used an abbreviation in the title of my previous post that I didn't define - CPM. It stands for Church Planting Movements and will be the focus of our strategy in India. A CPM is a phenomena that missiologists began taking note of in the 1990s. It has resulted in a complete paradigm shift over the last decade in the way most missions organizations approach church planting around the world.

At its simplest, a CPM is a movement of rapidly multiplying churches. David Garrison says it this way - "A Church Planting Movement is a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment."

How we (the church) stumbled upon this ...
In the 1990s, several segments of population around the world (within China, India, Cuba, North Africa, etc.) began experiencing explosive growth in the number of churches and believers. God was up to something big! He was also up to something quite different than had been seen in recent time. This explosive growth showed some unusual characteristics. The growth was occurring in persecuted population segments. It was not marked by a organizational structure. In fact, organizations couldn't keep up with the growth; it was out of control. It was made up mostly of small churches (10 - 50 people) meeting in homes or in the community. Most leaders were not seminary trained and were not paid. It was self-sufficient and did not require a lot of outside resources or funding. The movements were marked by signs and wonders that are difficult for many of us to comprehend. These characteristics were unusual for the modern times, but they also looked remarkably similar to characteristics of the early church in the book of Acts! Could it be that God has chosen this time in history to begin pouring out his Spirit in a special way on certain peoples of the world?

What kind of growth are we talking about ...
Here is one example. In China I had the privilege of meeting and learning from a couple who had sparked tens of thousands of churches to form and hundreds of thousands of people to begin following Christ in less than a decade. As you can imagine, people were skeptical of the reports so some outside research teams were sent in to validate them. In one case the researchers found a church that was 13 generations removed from the original. Take 2^13 and see what would happen if all the churches had multiplied like that! It was not uncommon to find churches 5-10 generations away from the source. Everything was really happening as reported, and rapid multiplication was the key. Similar, but smaller movements have continued to occur all across China. The church in China is estimated today at over 100 Million and growing. The church in China has grown from relatively few in 1980 to a point where more people attend church in China than in the U.S.!!

So I ask you, who wouldn't want to be a part of this? CPM is our goal for our work in India. It is a huge and humanly unattainable goal. We set it as our goal because it is the only way possible to meet the spiritual needs we see. Building a church, or two, or ten just would not sufficiently meet people's needs. In addition, it would take monetary resources away from other initiatives such as orphan care, HIV/AIDS care, Leprosy care, providing clean drinking water, and fighting poverty.

Fortunately, we share this goal with many like-minded groups throughout the India. We are all working together to see the Kingdom expand - and Kingdom expansion is the goal. I think I'll spend some time writing on Kingdom expansion during my next post. You can't really understand the Biblical basis for CPM until you have a little bit of a grasp on what Jesus is talking about when he refers to the Kingdom. He talks about the Kingdom more than just about anything else yet it is a word we don't use much in the church. In fact most of Jesus' parables begin with the phrase 'the Kingdom of God (or of the Heavens) is like ...'. These parables are where we first start to see CPM principles in the Bible.