Here is an update from D. Rajendran, our Director of International Mission, who runs point on our training of church planters for ONE Prayer in Southern India. With almost 600 churches in our network in Tamil, I question I have been repeatedly asked is, “How do you afford to pay the salaries and budgets for all those pastors and churches?” My answer is short, “We don’t. We don’t pay one pastors salary and we haven’t built one church building.”
People are usually surprised.
Our relationship is not money-driven or asset-centered.
Old world models of partnership orbit around dollars. New world models of partnership orbit around shared vision, shared work, shared resources, and shared strategy.
Old world models of partnership focus on individual undividable resources like a funding a salary for a pastor or missionary. New world models of partnership focus on universally dividable resources.
In other words, it’s a resource that can be shared equally among all the parties and easily reproduced and replicated with others.
Does it cost money to create universally dividable resources? Yes. But, the impact is exponential and empowering. Where an individual undividable resource, like money for a salary or building, is addition and often disempowering.
The churches in India are able to provide for themselves. Why would we handicap them with dependency on us for basic infrastructure cost?
So, what does a universally dividable resource look like? Read Raj’s post and you’ll get a snapshot of one such resource.
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When we train the church planters to plant new churches, one of the main things we teach them is to prepare lessons for next level. The common problems that are prevailing among the church planters are; what do we do next? And what to teach next? Our job is to help them to find answers for these questions.
During our 2nd module training, we broke the church planters into small groups and helped them prepare a lesson on goodness as a next step to for new followers of Jesus.
We focused our preparation based on Galatians 5:16-26. This passage talks about the fruit of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit. We focused on habits that we need to abandon and the character that we need to attain. The church planters came up with 9 lessons from the Bible passage, and tested them out on other small group members for practice.
I then took this material and edited it to help all the church planters to use them in their field. We have named this small group bible study booklet NIRAI VAZHAVU-Fullness of Life.
I thank God for all the Church planters who have prepared these lessons and who are using these lessons to change the lives of the people of India.
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