Church PLANT Manual

Session 3: Nurture and Transition • 79

Models (Pathways) for Multiplication

I. Transition leadership to qualified leaders and go PLANT elsewhere. This missionary model of church planting, the model World Impact has used through the years, envisions a church plant team planting a church knowing that they would not serve as long-term shepherds of a church which they planted. The goal of this model is to raise up local (indigenous) leaders from the community, equip them for pastoral leadership, and entrust the work to them through a formal process culminated in a commissioning service. Then the missionary team would go to their next target community and repeat the process. This approach is clearly reflected in World Impact’s previous church planting resources, to date, which were developed for World Impact staff who served as largely cross-culturally missionaries to the inner-cities of America. In this model, the church plant team plants a church with the vision to be a sending church. From inception, the church is formed with the intent to raise up and send out church plant teams, from the planted church, who will plant daughter churches. Regardless of the expression of the church that is planted, all churches should be sending churches (Acts 13:1-3) to advance the Kingdom of God in their context by releasing their very best leaders to go and PLANT new churches. We would highly recommend that the church plant teams that you intend to send out go through an Evangel School in II. Be a Sending Church: Develop and Send Out Church Plant Teams