Multicultural Missions Overview

Practical Steps

STEP ONE
Pray and enlist an intercessory prayer team. Church planting is spiritual warfare. The planter must surround himself with prayer warriors. Begin by contacting people who you know are praying believers. Develop a list of expectations that you will need to share with the people you are recruiting. Give them specific roles they will play and how you plan to communicate with them. Select people you know will intentionally pray with you.  

STEP TWO

Attend a church planter assessment. The assessment will help you reaffirm your gifts and calling. It will also evaluate your weaknesses and strengthens. You will be wise to get training on how to conduct assessments. This tool will help you select a good team, or core group, for a new church plant.

STEP THREE

Enlist a mentor. A mentor is someone who walks alongside you in the ministry. He will assume a Barnabas-to-Paul or a Paul-to-Timothy relationship. This person needs to be someone with church planting experience, who can ask perceptive and probing questions concerning your life and ministry.  

STEP FOUR

Learn about church planting. The Church Planting Group of the North American Mission Board has developed a valuable tool called Basic Training for Church Planters. This training session prepares you, your spouse, and your mentor for a successful launching of a new church. Also, a number of organizations and printed materials exist who specialize in equipping church planters. For information about Basic Training for Church Planters or to inquire about other resources, contact the Church Planting Group at 770-410-6000.

STEP FIVE

Develop a church plant proposal. Writing a proposal will provide you the opportunity to articulate your God-given vision and core values, translating them into a viable plan. A biblical position on unity in diversity and philosophy of ministry should be included. The target audience may be a written geographic area (which opens ministry to different ethnic, socioeconomic, and age groups) as opposed to a traditional age and ethnic subsection of the community.  

STEP SIX

Enlist the support of a partnering church. A partnering church gives support to a new church plant. It guides the new church plant from infancy to self-support. The partner church needs to be one that understands the concepts of a multicultural church. The support can be in the form of financial assistance, meeting space, administration, budgeting, volunteers, and so forth.  

STEP SEVEN

Do evangelism and core group/leadership development. Jesus’ key command in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20) was “make disciples.” From the very beginning, it is crucial to set an example of evangelizing, developing disciples, and training leaders. In the desire to realize the vision of a multicultural local church, it is tempting to skip over, and consequently short-circuit, the very process of discipleship Jesus gave us.  It is essential not to move too fast at this point.

In The Master Plan of Evangelism, Robert E. Coleman gets to the heart of Jesus’ strategy: “Why did Jesus deliberately concentrate His life upon comparatively so few people? 

Jesus was a realist. He fully realized the fickleness of depraved human nature, as well as the satanic forces of this world amassed against humanity. In this knowledge, He based His evangelism on a plan that would meet needs. The multitudes of discordant and bewildered souls were potentially ready to follow Him, but Jesus individually could not possibly give them the personal care they needed. His only hope was to recruit men imbued with His life to do it for Him. Hence, He concentrated on those who were to be the beginning of this leadership. Though He did what He could to help the multitudes, He devoted Himself primarily to a few men, rather than the masses, so that the masses could be saved. This was the genius of His strategy. 

Ken Horiuchi of Grace Mission in Yao, Japan, would say that a pastor “doing the ministry” can be the problem of either a micro-church or a mega-church. When the pastor is simply doing ministry rather than discipling, a "ceiling" is created based on the capacity of that pastor. However, discipleship incorporates everyone into the ministry and strengthens the whole body.  

STEP EIGHT

Organize ministry systems, structures, and finance.  In order to effectively mobilize a core group, a church plant’s systems, structures, and financial operations need to be in place. Who serves on what ministry team (worship, children’s ministry, greeters, assimilation, and spiritual gift identification)?  Who reports to whom? When and where does the core group meet? How are the finances handled in an above-reproach manner?   

STEP NINE

Prepare to publicly launch the church.  The most important aspect of planting the church is setting the Launch Day. This needs to be set anywhere from nine months to 18 months in advance. Develop your strategy and goals (in week increments) leading up to the Launch Day. The closer you get to the Launch Day, your strategy timeline needs to be set on a day-to-day schedule. Some of the items that need to be addressed are: signs, maps, order of service, clear instructions for all special events, sign-up cards, and so on.  An understanding of God’s timing is essential in determining when to start a new church. In an urgency to reach the lost and realize the vision of a multicultural church, it is tempting to race ahead of the Holy Spirit or not to hear God when redirection comes.  It is important to remember that our knowledge of multiethnic church planting will never exceed our dependence on God.  

STEP TEN

Keep asking God to show you where He is at work.  In Experiencing God, Henry Blackaby’s life and teaching point us directly back to God:  “Our church sensed that God wanted us to help start new churches all across Central and Western Canada. We had hundreds of towns and villages that had no evangelical church. To know where to start churches, some churches would start with a population study or survey. Then they would apply human logic to decide where the most promising productive places might be. By now, you know that I would take a different approach.  “We tried to find out what God already was doing around us. We believed that He would show us where He was at work, and that revelation would be our invitation to join Him. We began praying and watching to see what God would do next in answer to our prayers.”   

STEP 11

Continue learning.  Ortiz recommends the homework of biblical study, leadership training, social science research of your community, reflection, meditation, prayer, and finally evaluation. The counsel from Ortiz and Blackaby presents two sides of the same coin—preparation and dependency.   

STEP 12

Expect major adjustments. We should expect redirection from God, especially at the beginning of a church, but also throughout a church’s life. The reality of a church plant is often different and more than what was expected. When God redirects from your original plan, make the necessary adjustments.  In Experiencing God, we face the challenge and possibilities of unreservedly following God:  

“Many of us want God to speak to us and give us an assignment. However, we are not interested in making any major adjustments in our lives. Biblically, that is impossible. Every time God spoke to people in the Scriptures about something He wanted to do through them, major adjustments were necessary. They had to adjust their lives to God. Once the adjustments were made, God accomplished His purposes through those He called.”    

The vision of multicultural churches is from God. The power to plant multicultural churches is through God. The glory from multicultural churches belongs to God. Therefore, with the apostle Paul, we praise Him: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! . . . For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory forever. Amen,” (see Romans 11:33, 36, KJV).