Developing Tentmaking Leaders Essential

"Drawing again from the writings of the father of the church movement, Dr. McGavran, I quote from his book:"

“Develop unpaid lay leaders. Laymen have played a great part in urban expansions of the Church. One secret of growth in the cities of Latin America has been that, from the beginning, unpaid common men led the congregations, which therefore appeared to the masses to be truly Chilean or Brazilian affairs. In any land, when laborers, mechanics, clerks, or truck drivers teach the Bible, lead in prayer, tell what God has done for them, or exhort the brethren, the Christian religion looks and sounds natural to ordinary men. Whatever unpaid laymen, earning their living as others do, subject to the same hazards and bound by the same work schedules, lack in correctness of Bible teaching or beauty of prayers, they more than make up for by their intimate contact with their own people. No paid worker from the outside and certainly no missionary from abroad can know as much about a neighborhood as someone who has dozens of relatives and intimates all about him. True, on new ground the outsider has to start new expansions. No one else can. But the sooner he turns the churches over to local men the better.3"
3 Donald McGavran (1970), Understanding Church Growth, Eerdmans.

(Saturation House Church Planting, Robert Fitts, Sr. Chapter 55 in, “Nexus: The World House Church Movement Reader, Rad Zdero, William Carey, 2007 pg 468-469.)

Most Effective Form of Evangelism is E-1 By Nationals. However, 4/5th of unreached do not live near any Christian!

“Let us straightforwardly concede right here that, all other things being equal, the national worker always has a communication advantage over the foreigner …………E-1 evangelism – where a person communicates to his own people – is obviously the most potent kind of evangelism. People need to hear the Gospel in their own language. Can we believe God intends for them to hear it from people who speak without a trace of accent? The foreign missionary communicator may be good, but he is not good enough. If it is so important for Americans to have thirty translations of the New Testament to choose from, and even a “Living Bible,” which allows the Bible to speak in colloquial English, then why must many peoples around the world suffer along with a Bible that was translated for them by a foreigner, and thus almost inevitably speaks to them in halting phrases?

This is why the easiest, most obvious surge forward in evangelism in the world today will come if Christian believers in every part of the world are moved to reach outside their churches and win their cultural near neighbours to Christ. They are better able to do that than any foreign missionary. It is a tragic perversion of Jesus’ strategy if we continue to send missionaries to do the job that local Christians can do better. There is no excuse for a missionary in the pulpit when a national can do the job better. There is no excuse for a missionary to be doing evangelism on an E-3 basis, at an E-3 distance from the people, when there are local Christians who are effectively winning the same people as part of their E-1 sphere.

In view of the profound truth that (other things being equal) E-1 evangelism is more powerful than E-2 or E-3 evangelism, it is easy to see how some people have erroneously concluded that E-3 evangelism is therefore out-of-date, due to the wonderful fact that there are now Christians throughout the whole world. It is with this perspective that major denominations in the US, have at some points acted on the premise that there is no more need for missionaries of the kind who leave home to go to a foreign country and struggle with a totally strange language and culture. There premise is that “there are Christians over there already”……..

With the drastic fall-off in the value of the US- Dollar and the tragic shrinking of U.S. church budgets, some US. denominations have had to curtail their missionary activity to an unbelievable extent, and they have in part tried to console themselves by saying that it is time for the national church to take over. In our response to this situation, we must happily agree that wherever there are local Christians effectively evangelizing, there is nothing more potent than E-1 evangelism.

However, the truth about the superior power of E-1 evangelism must not obscure the obvious fact that E-1 evangelism is literally impossible where there are no witnesses within a given language or cultural group.

…………. Far from being a task that is now out-of-date, the shattering truth is that at least 4 out of 5 (4/5^th) non-Christians in the world today are beyond the reach of any Christians E-1 evangelism. Why is this fact not widely known? I’m afraid that all our exultation about the fact that every country of the world has been penetrated has allowed many to suppose that every culture has by now penetrated. This misunderstanding is a malady so widespread that it deserves a special name. Let us call it “people blindness” that is, blindness to the existence of separate peoples within countries- a blindness (pg113)

(Crucial Dimensions on World Evangelisation, Arthur F. Glasser, Paul G. Hiebert C Peter Wagner, Ralph D. Winter. William Carey Library 1980 pg 111- 113)

What is the Goal of Missions? When has the Task Been Completed An E1-E3 Scale Perspective?

“The master pattern of the expansion of the Christian movement-- is first for special E-2 and E-3 efforts to cross cultural barriers into new communities to establish strong, on-going, vigorously — evangelizing denominations, and then for that national church to carry the work forward on the really high-powered E-1 level. We are thus forced to believe that until every tribe and tongue has a strong, powerfully evangelizing church in it, and thus an E-1 witness within it, E-2 and E-3 efforts coming from outside are still essential and highly urgent.”

(Crucial Dimensions on World Evangelisation, Arthur F. Glasser, Paul G. Hiebert C Peter Wagner, Ralph D. Winter. William Carey Library 1980 pg 112)

Send no Missionaries? Mistakenly Assuming there are Churches near by to Do the Job!

These statements are of Critical Importance: This article, though older, examines false thinking that still persists in 21^st Century missions.

Can Natives do it better in the 10/40 window? There is a Serious lack of understanding of the task that is ahead, and what it will take to accomplish it. E2-E3 Evangelism. There are few “Natives” near by to be a witness. All who go are engaging in E2-E3 Evangelism – even if they live next door.

Read this article.

“In recent years, a serious misunderstanding has crept into the thinking of many evangelicals. Curiously, it is based on a number of wonderful facts: the Gospel has now gone to the ends of the earth. Christians have now fulfilled the Great Commission in at least a geographical sense. At this moment of history, we can acknowledge with great respect and pride those evangelists of every nation who have gone before us and whose sacrificial efforts and heroic accomplishments have made Christianity by far the world’s largest and most widespread religion, with a Christian church on every continent and in practically every country. This is no hollow victory. Now more than at any time since Jesus walked the shores of Galilee, we know with complete confidence that the Gospel is for all men, that it makes sense in any language, and that it is not merely a religion of the Mediterranean or of the West.

This is all true. On the other hand, many Christians as a result have the impression that the job is now nearly done and that to finish it we need only to forge ahead in local evangelism on the part of the now world’ wide church, reaching out wherever it has already been planted. Many Christian organizations. ranging widely from the World Council of Churches to many U.S. denominations, even some evangelical groups, have rushed to the conclusion that we may now abandon traditional missionary strategy and count on local Christians everywhere to finish the job.

This is why evangelism is the one great password to evangelical unity today. Not everyone can agree on foreign mission strategies, but more people than ever agree on evangelism, because that seems to be the one obvious job that remains to be done. All right! There is nothing wrong with evangelism. Most conversions must inevitably take place as the result of some Christian witnessing to a near neighbor, and that is evangelism. The awesome problem is the additional truth that most non-Christians in the world today are not culturally near neighbors of any Christians, and that it will take a special kind of ‘cross-cultural” evangelism to reach them.

Let us approach this subject with some graphic illustrations. I am thinking, for example, of the hundreds of thousands of Christians in Pakistan. Almost all of them are people who have never been Muslims and do not have the kind of relationship with the Muslim community that encourages witnessing. Yet they live in a country that is 97 per cent Muslim! The Muslims, on their part, have bad attitudes toward the stratum of society represented by the Christians. One group of Christians has boldly called itself The Church of Pakistan. Another group of Christians goes by the name, The Presbyterian Church of Pakistan. While these are ‘national” churches in the sense that they are part of the nation, they can hardly he called national churches if this phrase implies that they are culturally related to that vast bloc of people who constitute the other 97 per cent of the country, namely, the Muslims. Thus, although the Muslims are geographically near neighbors of these Christians, normal evangelism will not do the job.

Or take the Church of South India, a large church which has brought together the significant missionary efforts of many churches over the last century. But while it is called The Church of South India, 95 per cent of its members come from only five out of the more than 100 social classes (castes) in South India. Ordinary evangelism on the part of existing Christians will persuade men and women of those same five social classes. It would be much more difficult - it is in fact another kind of evangelism — for this church to make great gains within the 95 other social classes, which make up the vast bulk of the population.

Or take the great Batak church in Northern Sumatra. Here is one of the famous churches of Indonesia. Its members have been doing much evangelism among fellow Bataks, of whom there are still many thousands

whom they can reach without learning a foreign language, and among whom they can work with maximum efficiency of direct contact and understanding. But at the same time, the vast majority of all the people in

Indonesia speak other languages, and are of other ethnic units. For the Batak Christians of Northern Sumatra to win people to Christ from other parts of Indonesia will he a distinctly different kind of task. It is another kind of evangelism.

Or take the great church of Nagaland in Northeast India. Years ago. American missionaries from the plains of Assam reached up into the Naga hills and won some of the Ao Nagas. Then these Ao Nagas won practically their whole tribe to Christ. Next thing. Ao Nagas won members of the nearby Santdam Naga tribe, that spoke a sister language. These new Santdam Naga Christians then proceeded to win almost the whole of their tribe. This process went on until the majority of all fourteen Naga tribes became Christian. Now that most of Nagaland is Christian —even the officials of the state government are Christian — there is the desire to witness elsewhere in India. But for these Nagaland Christians to win other people in India is as much a foreign mission task as it is for Englishmen, Koreans, or Brazilians to evangelize in India. This is one of the reasons why so far the Nagas have made no significant attempt to evangelize the rest of India. Indian citizenship is one advantage the Naga Christians have compared to people from other countries, but citizenship does not make it easier for them to learn any of the hundreds of totally foreign languages in the rest of India.”

(Crucial Dimensions on World Evangelisation, Arthur F. Glasser, Paul G. Hiebert C Peter Wagner, Ralph D. Winter. William Carey Library 1980 pg 105-107)

E-2 &E-3 IS the Missionary Task to Unreached People. Don’t let the National Church restrain your Advancement

“Tough as this fourth category (E-2 or E-3) of growth is—it is the classical missionary task—it must be pointed out that all of our preceding charts suggest nothing less than that this task and technique is crucial for the reaching of at least 80 percent of the non-Christian world in Africa and Asia. But this is what we must do! Alas, how many missionaries are content to “let the- nationals do it” in a social unit already penetrated. Meanwhile, overlooking pockets and strata in the same field which the nationals are not as able to reach as the foreign missionary! This is especially true when the “National Church” unconsciously restricts the missionary to the limitations of its own immediate vision”

(Crucial Dimensions on World Evangelisation, Arthur F. Glasser, Paul G. Hiebert C Peter Wagner, Ralph D. Winter. William Carey Library 1980 pg 100-101)

Ralph D. Winters E-0, E-1, E-2, E-3 Scale: An Explanation

It refers to the cultural distance a missionary is from a person he is witnessing to: It has nothing to do with geographical distance. A German missionary my be no culturally distant while ministering to an Indian in Northern India, than an Indian from the south in Madras.

“Winter identifies three different kinds of evangelism, distinguished by the cultural distance that the evangelist spans in communicating effectively with intended hearers. The E Scale has been a widely used reference tool for describing and comparing evangelistic difficulties and needs.

E-0 Evangelism of people who are part of Christian families and peoples. It is basically catechism and renewal. (This Author will add -Working with backsliding Christians) No real cultural barriers are crossed.

E -1 Evangelism of people outside the church but within one’s culture. Only one barrier is crossed: the “stained-glass” membership boundaries of the church. This kind of evangelism is the “most powerful” because people are far more likely to understand what is being communicated in ways that they can pass on to others like themselves. (This Author will add -Working with nominal Christians, or secular humanist, or post modern people. An Agni African winning another Agni in the same village who is non-christian. Near Neighbor. Sharing the Gospel with your friend who grew up next door to you to church. Same culture evangelism with someone form the same Language and idioms as you.)

E-2 Evangelism of people of different but similar cultures. Two barriers are crossed: The “stained-glass” barrier and an additional cultural distance sufficient to require separate church fellowships. (This Author will add: - Winning people of different world view from your own but, a more distant Culture and language. Increasing differences. Agni Indennie evangelizing Agni Jobalin. Can be done, but work on language variances is needed. Communication is possible but different enough you need to be carefull. Canada this would be similar to an English person working with an Acadian French person. Requires completely different skills and techniques than E1 or E0)

E-3 Evangelism of people of radically different cultures. To emphasize the greater cultural distance of an evangelist attempting to communicate to a radically different and potentially hostile environment, it is supposed that evangelists attempt to cross at least three barriers in E-3 efforts. For example, working with Saharan nomads would require crossing the “stained-glass” barrier, a language barrier and a major lifestyle barrier. E-3 is the most difficult kind of evangelism.” (This author Adds: - E-3 is Cross cultural, cross Linguistical evangelism while learning a new culture that is radically foreign to you.)

(“Perspectives on the World Christian Movement”; Study Guide , Steve C. Hawthorne, 1999 Edition,Pg 64)

Natives Do Missions Better? No - Why Global Missions still requires Western or “Outsider” Missionaries.

“This is what is meant when we say that “crossing an ocean never made a missionary,” or “you can go 18,000 miles but it s the last 18 inches that count”. Geography is thus nearly irrelevant in such well known observations. But a brand new astonishing meaning for the same basic truth is the fact that the Christians who live next door to the Muslims in the Middle East, for example, may be the least likely to be effective missionaries to those Muslim people: it is the 18 inches that count, and if a person from afar can more easily cross that last 18 inches, then so be it, it has got to be arranged. In such cases there may be little strategy in waiting for local Christians to do the job.

The full weight of this presses down on us when we recall that the vast bulk ( say 80%) of the non-Christian world is at the E-2 and E-3 cultural distance form every existing Christian. This fact in turn has profound implications for concrete arrangements in strategy.”

(Crucial Dimensions on World Evangelisation, Arthur F. Glasser, Paul G. Hiebert C Peter Wagner, Ralph D. Winter. William Carey Library 1980 pg 98-99)