Multiplying Church Planters in Closed and Restricted-Access Countries

Please be praying for one of our training events next week. I will be part of a team going to Winchester, Virginia to teach Church Planting Essentials (CPE) to 35 missionaries serving with Outreach to Asia Nationals (OTAN). OTAN seeks to reach nations through nationals, by assisting nationals to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ to their own people in countries where missionaries cannot live and work freely.

28 of the missionaries we are training will be further trained and certified to use DCPI curriculum to train church planters back in the countries where they work. This is how we multiply church planters around the world. I’m excited to contemplate what might happen as OTAN missionaries train church planters in China, Russia, Jordan, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, and Vietnam—the nations represented by the OTAN missionaries participating in next week’s training event. Our research into the impact of DCPI training in several countries leads us to hope that on average each church planter trained at a DCPI event will start more than two new churches within the next five years, and each of those churches on average will bring more than 45 people from the power of Satan to Christ within that same timeframe.

It gets better. Several OTAN missionaries have been trained even earlier by DCPI, and over the past few months they have already trained 130 church planters in India, Nepal, and China (think: over 350 new churches and over 16,000 new Christians within five years)! Two of these OTAN missionaries will be appointed as DCPI Master Trainers next week. This means they will be able to certify National leaders in closed and restricted-access countries to train church planters in their own languages and in their own countries!

The partnership between DCPI and OTAN is just one example of many such partnerships that exist right now around the world. Christians of all kinds are constantly brought together by God’s Spirit, united by common vision and passion. Please be praying for us next week, that we will be planting the seeds of some church planting movements.