CATALYSE UPDATE JANUARY 2013
Pastor Ben KC Lee shared a CATALYSE update at the recent GC in Taipei.
I have been asked to present an update on what's happening in our five-year change process called CATALYSE. If you are new with us and this is the first time you heard about this. CATALYSE is our five-year change process from 2011 to 2015.
Allow me to give you a background about this strategic plan.., because we cannot talk about where we are going if we don't know where we came from.
Starting in the late 1970s, there was a Charismatic revival in Southeast Asia. Many Christians were touched and there were many salvations with crusades with Billy Graham and Louis Palau. God was doing a tremendous thing. So countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand even Australia were impacted from the late 70s to the early 80s. So in 1981, Hope started in Bangkok. This was over 30 years ago and was our first beginning. We started in the midst of the Charismatic revival. Our first church started and we went all over the world. Then in 2009, we had a second birth. We re-started in Kuching. All this means that we are a second-generation movement. A few of us where there in the 80s, some of us in the 90s. So, most of us today are the second generation in this church movement.
2011 was the launch of CATALYSE, our global master plan for the purpose of develop overarching direction, achieve synergy and recapture our cutting edge.
We can move forward when we know where we came from. To move forward, we also need to know who we are. For those of you who are new with us, we are a connectional movement. To understand what that means... let me illustrate with an African proverb. It takes a family to raise a child; but it takes a village to raise a family. That's why, personally for me, I have great difficulty with the concept of an independent church. Because it takes a church to raise a disciple but it takes a movement to raise a church. So we are not just any kind of setup, but we are a family, a connectional movement. It is important to know where we came from and who we are as we go to the future.
Today I am glad to report to you that, of the five-year master plan from 2011 to 2015, two years of that plan have now passed. So now we are at the 40% marker of this five-year change process. God is doing a change in our midst of this second-generation movement.
So what has happened this last year in our movement? How has God been changing us? There have been a lot of changes and we thank God for that. For example, you have noticed that in the past conferences have always had internal speakers. Now we have got external input. We are opening up as you can see. Even in this conference, the theme of Fivefold is a direct result of CATALYSE. We identified that we were at risk of becoming a two-fold movement, and that we have to be intentional about accelerating the development of fivefold ministers, which is the spiritual technology and the only spiritual structure we see in the whole of the OT or NT for the church. Let me just list a few more changes. Some of our initiatives have challenges. We are asking God how we move forward on some of them. There is progress too.
Firstly, I am pleased to report that our Cultural initiative team. We have documented our cultural attributes as a movement. We sat down and listed what is our attitude and spirit. In business terms we call it organisational culture or corporate culture. Our movement have talked a lot about imparting spirit. We have identified what the whole spirit is and our team here is at the moment developing a how to guide of to use our cultural attribute document. We want to transmit our culture.
Let's live out our culture that the new believers who get born again in our churches can see it embodied in us that it is normal to love Jesus, it is normal to follow Jesus, it is normal to plant churches and to make disciples. Because Christianity is not a religion, it is about a person. Going to church does not make you a Christian. Going to McDonalds doesn't make you a Big Mac. Christianity is about a person, Jesus. It's about following Jesus.
We have been intentionally building relationships with various movements. Of course now we have Larry Kreider from Dove International here with us. Just recently we've been invited to the RCCG's Holy Spirit Congress. RCCG is the Redeemed Christian Church of God. This is the largest African CPM (church planting movement) in the entire world today. So Pastor Simon and Dr. Brendan Kirby represented us in the conference where there were over 1 million people in Lagos, Nigeria. We are making inroads in connecting and in building relationships with other movements across the globe.
We are in the midst of developing key courses, particularly a church planting course and also counseling courses. They are in the pipeline.
Fourth, we are also in the process of developing a church health diagnostic toolkit that helps diagnose the health of local churches. This helps us assess our local churches and figure out where we need to put more attention. We are now testing the alpha version of this kit and so it's on the way.
We're also glad that our CPM initiative team is in the midst of developing cross-cultural church planter's competencies. This is a very big term but it means is that we are the skills of a person who goes to a different culture to plant churches. One such skill is cross-cultural communication for example in communicating the concept of sin in different cultures. Once we develop these competencies, it will have tremendous application in training. We'll be able to train church planting coaches on how to coach new church planters or aspiring planters.
Sixthly, we are developing done position papers. Our team of theological writers has drafted our position on spiritual manifestations and on female leadership. So both are currently on draft 1.0, so we hope to move it up to 2.0.
Finally, we have made progress in terms of NGO initiatives. Jesus taught us to feed the spiritually poor and feed the physically poor as well. So we have gathered a group of people across all our churches interacting on Facebook. So that's a snapshot of updates.
CATALYSE is a five-year change process. God is doing something in our lives and in our movement. I shared with you at the launch in Chiang Mai back in January 2011 that God is going to bring the fire but you and I need to be ready with the firewood. We need to be combustible so that when the spark comes, we will be ready to bring the fires of revival across the world. We started 32 years ago in a revival. Today we are at the cusp of the new thing God is about to do. He is catalysing change in our movement. So we rejoice that God is changing us and is changing our churches and our leaders, our members and we look forward to more changes to come.
Would you join me in praying that God would do and complete what he has started in our midst? Dear Lord we thank you that you love us so much, that you love us with an outrageous love, that even when we were lost and did not know that we were lost, that grace found us. Lord I thank you that you introduced yourself to me, that now I know Jesus and that I follow Jesus. Thank you Lord that all of us here have each other, that we can walk together as we follow Jesus. Dear God help us to be an authentic followers of Jesus, help our churches to be an authentic community of Christ followers. We pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.
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