T4T: A Discipleship ReRevolution: An Overview by John Lambert
Background
In the world of missions, a new wave of the Spirit of God is moving across nations and people planting churches where there were little to none before. This phenomenon has been called “Church Planting Movements” or “Church Multiplication Movements.”
In the book T4T: A Discipleship ReRevolution, missionary practitioners Ying Kai and Steve Smith seek to lay out the principles and background involved in one of the most explosive examples of “CPM” in modern history.
This book was born out of a growing hunger for missionary practitioners to understand the movement and how they can prepare themselves in their own contexts for a new move of God’s Spirit by implementing the key principles laid out in the book.
Asian Born
It carefully documents the work of an Asian couple (the Kais) working in an Asian context. Contrary to some thought, it is not another Western import or new method.
After reading this book, I can confidently say that for the serious missionary practitioner this may be “the most important book you’ve not yet heard of.”
Among the global missionary community and those who have heard the term “CPM” there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding as to what the term really means. A “CPM” is not a method or a strategy, but simply an observation of the phenomena of rapidly multiplying churches among a people group.
Many of these people groups where a CPM can be found are considered unreached which means that they have 2% of the population or less as believers.
In the recent past, CPM’s have been studied by missionary strategists such as David Garrison who wrote his first observations on the phenomena in his booklet “Church Planting Movements: How God is Redeeming a Lost World. (1999/2003). Of the CPM’s he has studied, he lists out 10 universal elements of a CPM.
But concerning the CPM Ying Kai initiated and the principles he lays out in Training for Trainers (T4T), Garrison writes,
“None has earned the title “CPM Best Practice” than the remarkable T4T that has exploded across a closed and crowded country in Asia.”
That is a pretty strong endorsement from a man who knows.
In the following days, I will attempt to do a chapter-by-chapter review of this important book and lay out some of the key principles and ideas I have found in each. Each post will contain about four chapters or so and I will post them as soon as I am able.
Even if you are not a cross cultural missionary, I believe you will find some key principles in this book that will be beneficial for you in your own context.
