Do you want to serve a CPM ministry overseas?
Several of the church-planting movements in Asia have become touristic attractions. Scores of foreigners come to visit ministry leaders and watch them in action. Some hope they will absorb some experience or insight that will make them equally effective in their homeland.
Bigoted authorities in some countries have started sending police agents to tourist hotels to check the papers of foreign Christians, in order to black-list them. Journalists come take photographs at CPM events and publish slanderous articles charging foreigners with buying converts.
Others want to get in on CPM action by playing a more supportive role. These can sometimes prove a real asset from the Lord, provided they have some helpful skill or ability and know how to serve in a discrete manner.
Then have something to offer to CPM ministries
Foreigners, who effectively serve overseas CPMs, without buying converts or suborning leaders, do so in genuinely helpful ways. Here are a few of the ways in which you might serve, aside from making cash donations.
Community development projects. Christians have always sought the uplift and betterment of communities, through peace-making efforts, health or educational programs, literacy training, clean water, agricultural improvement, and much more.
Professional training. Learn from CPM leaders how to cooperate in providing urgent, proven, strategic leadership training, then do your part in making it happen over one to three years. Provide training in a manner that leaders can do the same with others.
Interact with visionary leaders. If you have a gift of vision and enjoy an entrepreneurial mindset, in addition to a strong sense of empathy, then you and ministry leaders, who are usually very bright chaps, can vision and plan on a national scale.
Transcultural communication. If you have experience in designing, testing and training in messages and media suitable to other culture groups, then you could help design and provide needed materials and techniques for fieldwork.
Pastoral duties and care. Where 100s and 1000s of local folk are assuming leadership of new cells and churches, they remain desperate for counsel and insight in the care and feeding of the Lord’s sheep. You could spend 100s of joy-filled hours counseling such leaders and holding seminars for them.
Mentorship training and materials. Most training in CPMs best occurs through more experienced leaders who mentor the less experienced in chains that go several generations deep. You could offer workshops on mentoring techniques and on use of menu-driven training materials in suitable language.
Business consulting. In CPMs, there are 1000s of new believers whose transformed character would make them exemplary business leaders. However, they need coaching and consultation at every phase of implementing a business plan. Believers in the market place hold the greatest potential of evangelizing a nation than in any other sector.
Healing, deliverance and spiritual warfare. Newly Christianizing populations remain very much in touch with the invisible world of their ancestors and traditional religions. Specialists experienced in dealing with spiritual phenomena can help immensely.
Institutional and professional support. Every CPM benefits from Bible translation services, media production specialists, curriculum development experts, research designers and statisticians, social cartographers, counselor trainers, and more.
And plan on repeated visits
Once CPM leaders discover your skills and availability, they will arrange their calendars, even open their homes, to receive you and work you into their plans. Thus, you will enjoy a level of involvement that tourists do not even know exists.
Whilst you may never become the catalyst of a CPM in your home country, you will be richly rewarded for serving the Body of Christ on its growing edge.
Galen Currah
Very helpful. And the kes, of course, in collaboration w/ the points above is to….actually go.