On This Rock - A Church Planting Sampler

8 • O N T HIS R OCK : A C HURCH P LANTING S AMPLER

Evangel School, and our Planting Churches among the City’s Poor , a two- volume reference compendium with the major resources we have used over the past twenty plus years of planting churches among the poor in the inner cities of America. Together, these books themselves include more than 1700 pages of material, so, in order to expose you to the breadth of the kinds of materials these volumes contain, we produced this sampler.

We organized this broad collection of articles and graphics under seven strategic categories from all four volumes:

• Church Planting Overview • Theology of Culture and the Poor

• The Great Tradition and Creedal Theology • Church Planting Models and Strategies • Church Planting Movements • Church Planting Roles and Responsibilities • Empowering Indigenous Leadership

Under these themes you will find a plethora of sample miscellaneous materials from these four volumes: graphics, articles, essays, charts, exercises and an abridged church planting bibliography, all included to expose you to the wealth of resources contained in these four volumes on the perils and promise of church planting. Lastly, we have provided the Tables of Contents from the books themselves, i.e., Ripe for Harvest , The Evangel Dean Handbook , and the Planting Churches among the City’s Poor two-volume reference works. (Please note: we have tagged each resource in the sampler so you can discern what resource a particular graphic or article is taken from). This sampler represents the training materials of World Impact, a Christian missions organization which has ministered in the inner cities of America for more than forty years ( www.worldimpact.org ). We are deeply committed to facilitating church-planting movements by evangelizing, equipping and empowering the unchurched urban poor. World Impact’s purpose is to honor and glorify God and to delight in him among the unchurched urban poor by knowing God and making him known. For us, the fastest, most efficient, and most powerful method to impact and transform urban poor communities is to plant healthy Christ-centered churches where the light and life of Jesus Christ is proclaimed and demonstrated for all to see. Our belief is that through the planting of healthy churches among the poor, the Holy Spirit will show his trans- formative power within and through the members of these neighborhoods.