CATALYSE - DEVELOP CHURCH PLANTING COURSE

This initiative is all about producing a church planting course to equip would-be church planters with the knowledge and knowhow of doing church planting internationally. Our initiative team consists of Ps JR (Seattle, USA), Julian Lee (Singapore), Ben Seah (Brisbane, Australia) and Ps James Loke (Singapore). Today Pastor James Loke writes about the CATAYLSE initiative "Developing a Church Planting Course"

In the mid-90s, our movement produced a manual titled “Church-Planting Kit” which contained our philosophy, methodology and basic statistical forms. It was designed to be a quick start-up kit for aspiring church planters. Since then there has been various attempts to develop a church planting course to equip church planters before they venture out to do the church plant. Some of our churches do have some form of teachings to help their church planters in addition to on-the-job training in an eclectic fashion.

This initiative will have the expertise of a team who have been involved in missions for many years, including much cross-cultural experience.

The course will cover subjects like doctrines, self-management, church growth and cross-cultural communications. The range of subjects is to equip the church planting to be able to go to a new country, adapt to a new culture and be adept to start a church plant from scratch with a small team and build it up to a small church of about 40-50 people. It is envisaged that the church planting team will face all sorts of problems and challenges, including ones that will be different from those they faced at home when running a life group, unit or district. In addition, they would have to stand on their own feet and answer all questions in the local situation.

The curriculum has been finalised and the course developers are into writing or adapting teaching materials from various sources. The course content will be finished in 2013. After that it will be trialled in a few churches in our movement before being made available to HIM churches in 2015.

Written by Pastor James Loke 

For more information write to us at

spt@byhim.org

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