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Your church may never be featured on a list of the largest churches in the world. Your church may never even be considered large. Yet, you are part of the largest Church in the world—the Church of Jesus Christ. Granted, it can be humbling to see and hear about the amazing growth of churches overseas, while not experiencing that same growth closer to home. But my hope is that God’s work in the following five churches in El Salvador, Brazil, West Africa, Indonesia and South Korea will stimulate your expectancy level and even stir you to follow some of their principles, which cross all cultural and geographical barriers.
Although South Korea is home to the majority of the world’s 10 largest churches—some with attendance surpassing 250,000—other congregations in countries around the globe, although somewhat smaller in attendance, are giants in their own right. Small by global standards, 25,000-member Igreja da Paz church in Brazil would rank No. 2 if placed among the United States’ largest churches, and The Family of God Church in Indonesia with 20,000 members would rank No. 11 (based on Outreach/Church Growth Today’s 2006 Top 100 Largest U.S. Churches list).
I’m inviting you to take a journey with me beginning in Central America and ending in Southeast Asia. Together, we will visit five of the world’s giants. Although each one uses cell groups as a means of growing, the principles behind multiplying these cell groups are unique—and transferable. No need to pack anything except a heart for spreading the Good News—and a pen and paper to take notes on how to do this better!
Casting Cells
We begin in El Salvador, Central America’s smallest country, sometimes referred to as the Land of Volcanoes due to frequent seismic and volcanic activities. Elim Church sits in the capital city of San Salvador. Of the country’s nearly 7 million Salvadorans, 83% are Catholic; however, an estimated 1 million are Protestant evangelicals, and this number is growing with the help of the simple, but efficient Elim Church.
I first visited the church in 1996 and instantly saw how God has created a new culture at Elim, quite unlike the Latin communities around it. Elim is extremely organized, seeing God’s wonderful order in Scripture and believing that God wants it to accurately measure what’s happening in its midst.
For example, by Tuesday morning all of Elim’s 80 staff pastors can tell you the previous week’s exact numbers: attendance, conversions, baptisms, people visited and those trained. Each leader must know where the church as a whole stands, and what he or she needs to individually do to more effectively reach the entire city for Jesus.
Statistics are critical for Elim. The church measures progress toward its main goal—penetrating its city for Jesus—through the multiplication of cell groups, which more than 118,000 people attend each week. These 11,000 cell groups of three to 15 people meet outside the church building for the purpose of evangelism, community and spiritual growth. Organized geographically, each cell strives to multiply within its own area.
Elim’s cells first started in 1986, though it was a long process of failing, regrouping, perfecting the cell system, and failing once again. But the church kept pressing on to improve its cells. Now, on average, each cell multiplies within six months.
Josefina López was part of this multiplication. Seven years ago, she was one of El Salvador’s 80,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses. At the time, an Elim cell group happened to be meeting next door to her house. Her neighbors befriended her and lovingly invited her to their group, but Josefina refused. The cell multiplied and formed another one down the street. Then it multiplied again—this time behind her house. The neighbors of all three cells invited Josefina to their groups, but she still resisted. Yet, she noticed the groups’ joy, the vibrant singing, and especially her neighbors’ changed lives. Finally, Josefina visited the cell behind her house where she heard a clear presentation of the Gospel message. She was soon baptized, and just 15 days after her conversion, Josefina opened her home to host a new cell, which has now multiplied four times.
Elim’s powerful example has stimulated many churches to start multiplying cells outside the church building. We can’t expect people to come to church; we must take the church to them. What would cell groups look like in your neighborhood?
One-on-One Makes Two
Traveling southeast into South America, we arrive in Brazil, where Abe Huber, a North American missionary kid, was born and raised.
I stayed at Huber’s home in 2002 while leading a conference at his church, Igreja da Paz, and found him to be more Brazilian than North American. After each evening service, for example, he preferred to hang out with fellow Brazilians into the wee hours of the morning. “That’s just Abe,” his co-workers told me. He even married a Brazilian.
Now Huber leads a church-planting movement that’s winning and discipling thousands for Jesus in Manaus, a city of 1.6 million residents located on the north bank of the Rio Negro. Some 900 miles inland from the Atlantic, and the only city within a 600-mile radius, Manaus is a landing spot for tourists eager to explore the dense Amazon jungle. The country is home to some 188 million people—74% of who are Roman Catholic.
And it’s among these people that discipleship must start one-on-one, says Huber. As a youth, he was impacted through one-on-one discipleship, and he hasn’t forgotten those lessons—now integrating the method into the church’s training process.
Anyone who comes to a celebration service or a cell group is assigned a one-on-one mentor. The two meet weekly, and the mentor guides the new person through additional training classes and spiritual retreats. The entire process is called Micro Discipleship Strategy—MDA (for Método de Discipulado Apostólico)—and is a mix of one-on-one discipleship, Bible courses and spiritual retreats, taking six months to one year to complete. The church’s goal is for each person in the church to plant an evangelistic cell group, multiply it, and even plant an Igreja da Paz church. As a result, they’ve planted hundreds of churches throughout Brazil.
What excited me so much about Igreja da Paz was its emphasis on both large and small churches. Huber realizes that it takes all sizes to get the job done. He’s a gifted apostle, able to lead his huge mother church, but knows that other leaders may not have those same gifts. I was amazed to see many much smaller Igreja da Paz churches located just a few minutes from the 15,000-member mother church. Most of these local churches follow the MDA strategy, but it’s not a requirement. Each church is self-governing, has its own place to meet and maintains a fraternal relationship with the Igreja da Paz movement.
Huber is taking his MDA strategy to major cities throughout Brazil and continues to see powerful results. His example has inspired me to resist the small church/large church dichotomy. Why not both? I’ve been encouraged to take reproduction at all levels more seriously. Have you considered planting a church? Mothering a church plant? God might want your church to become a multiplication center—making disciples who eventually plant churches.
Soul Therapy
We head east over the Atlantic Ocean to land in the Côte d’Ivoire, a West African country slightly larger than the size of New Mexico. The country is home to 17.7 million residents, many of whom are French-speaking and work in agriculture. It’s estimated that some 35–40% are Muslim, 20–30% are Christians, and another 40% practice indigenous beliefs.
It’s the last group that requires what Pastor Dion Yaye Robert terms “soul therapy.” His church, Eglise Protestante Baptiste Oeuvres et Mission Internationale (EPBOM), doesn’t focus on the starting point of salvation (the sinner’s prayer) as much as the end goal (a changed life). Animism (the belief in the appeasement of spirits who control all life events) has so thoroughly dominated African culture that people for centuries have lived in fear and guilt.
EPBOM has discovered that unless salvation includes breaking the satanic strongholds caused by animism, believers quickly revert to past bondage.
“In the lives of the sheep, there will often be strongholds that need to be torn down,” Robert says. “Through soul therapy, these strongholds can be torn down and the flock of God freed from bondage.”
Soul therapy is the process of tearing down ungodly strongholds including immoral activity, curses, animistic fears and ancestor worship. The training is based on the cross of Christ and embracing Kingdom values that lead to a transformed life. EPBOM’s strength is the ability to turn enslaved people into fervent evangelists. Those who go through the training are well-prepared to win unbelievers and then prepare them through soul therapy to win their friends and neighbors.
You might not face the same problems associated with animism, but inevitably other more subtle satanic strongholds are present in the lives of believers everywhere. In many cultures, for example, people are bound with the sins of unforgiveness, rejection and slavery to materialism. People might accept Jesus and even attend church, but unless they deal with these deeper issues, in time, they fall away.
From EPBOM, we learn that our training needs to deeply touch sin issues that hold people in slavery. Far too many people slip through the back door. They pray the sinner’s prayer but are never freed from the sinner within. EPBOM takes nothing for granted. It fully prepares worshippers for the ensuing battle. Is your church intentional about equipping and transforming new believers?
Everyone’s a Minister
Heading east, we land off Asia’s mainland, on one of Indonesia’s 10,000 inhabited islands—an area still recovering from December 2004’s deadly tsunami.
But the city of Solo is also where Obaja Tanto Setiawan went to junior high school some 30 years ago. At the time, he had no hair. No one—including the doctors—knew why he had lost his hair, and his family couldn’t find any legitimate help. Friends and family urged him to try witch doctors and magic potions, but nothing worked. Then one day, someone suggested Jesus. Why not? Setiawan thought. He prayed, and his hair began growing back. When someone questioned him about the new growth, he answered, “It must be the medicine.” Soon the hair disappeared again, and Setiawan quickly realized that he’d denied Jesus and begged again for mercy. Today, he has a full head of black hair.
Setiawan’s miracle so completely impacted him that he made a promise to Jesus—I’ll serve You all the days of my life. As a successful businessman, he actively ministered in his church. But in September 1989, God called Setiawan, who had no formal training or seminary education, to start a new church. Despite feelings of inadequacy, he began a cell group in his home that has now grown to some 20,000 people called The Family of God Church (GBI).
Setiawan has carried his simple faith message of God’s power in weakness throughout his ministry, believing God to work the impossible in weak, human vessels, even in a nation where 88% of the 250 million people are Muslim.
In 1999, Setiawan traveled to Bogota, Colombia, to learn about the G12 strategy (each person mentors and raises up 12 disciples who in turn disciple and mentor 12 new disciples) at the enormous International Charismatic Mission church. He couldn’t speak English or Spanish, and as a result, didn’t understand most of what was said during the week-long conference. But he did catch one phrase: “Anyone can be a fruitful cell leader.” He saw clearly how God wanted him to develop his entire congregation to be ministers rather than “hearers.”
When I visited GBI years later, I witnessed Setiawan’s dream coming true: illiterate people leading others to Christ through cell ministry, discipling them, and then preparing them to lead their own cell groups. The church likes to ask the weakest and the poorest cell leaders to testify to what God has done in their cell through conversion and multiplication. In this way, GBI encourages everyone to get involved in a cell group, and eventually lead their own. To help, the church offers a training track—a spiritual retreat, a seminar and three Bible courses.
GBI should encourage all of us to look beyond those who appear to be the “leader type” and to see God’s power in the weak and lowly. Perhaps those who sit in your pews today are the ones God wants to use as leaders to reach your community.
Mountain of Prayer
Continuing north on the last leg of our journey, we arrive in Seoul, South Korea, home to some 10.3 million people. The entire country of 49 million bustles with life and confidence. It’s a land newly touched with Christianity (only in the last 50 years), and hope and expectation fill the air.
On Sunday, April 6, 1997, I found myself at Yoido Full Gospel Church (YFGC), trying to physically count how many people were at the worship services. I’d heard many varying reports of church membership (ranging from 500,000 to 800,000), and hoped to find the real number. I started at 5:30 a.m. and completed my count at 8:30 p.m. (I wouldn’t recommend doing this!). I counted 253,000 people attending that Sunday in April. (Eight years later, I witnessed the same crowded worship services.)
Yet, it wasn’t until the next day that I understood the power behind this great church. I walked into the main sanctuary at 5:30 a.m. and saw 3,000 prayer warriors interceding before God.
“Give us Korea for Your Son Jesus,” they cried.
That day, I took one of the buses that leave the church every half-hour to bring the faithful to the prayer mountain, a converted cemetery about 25 miles from the church. As I walked through the prayer mountain, I heard muffled prayers coming from hundreds of underground caves. Some 10,000 prayer warriors pass through this mountain each week.
I learned from this experience that prayer must be a church’s priority. To start, consider preaching on prayer and then establishing a weekly night of prayer—the senior pastor should be there. Those present should be in group prayer 90% of the time (as opposed to a 45-minute Bible study and 15 minutes of prayer).
I believe in God’s sovereignty. Yet somehow in His great wisdom, He has chosen to bless those who utterly depend on Him through prayer. At YFGC, the fruit is obvious. Some 25,000 cell groups later, the laity and its prayers have propelled this South Korean church to become the largest in the history of Christianity. Does your church prioritize prayer?
Used by Permission Outreach magazine, September/October 2006 http://outreachmagazine.com
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