the gospel to every person...

A Church Planting Movement among all peoples,
the gospel to every person,
every believer a full participant in the Great Commission.

Tuesday's "What was Jesus intent?" was written to address the last part of our region's vision statement: "every believer a full participant in the Great Commission."

Today I'd like to share some of our thinking as a church planting team on how we are looking to take "the gospel to every person" in our assigned people group (the Guayas Mestizo.)

How are we going to take the gospel to the 3.3-million people in our province?

Below in our "You pray...and God answers" report, the baptism ratio of the house churches is 3:1. What this means is that it takes three local believers to baptize one new convert over a year's time. This ratio is currently around 44:1 in the SBC. It takes 44 Baptists one year to baptize every new convert.

So what is the point?

The point is that if we could somehow turn around our 3:1 baptism ratio to 1:8, we could personally share the gospel with every person in less than five years. Not only that, we would easily reach our team goal of 500,000 followers of Christ in the coming five years.

What we are saying with the 1:8 ratio is that every single one of us must pray, serve, evangelize, baptize, disciple and teach just EIGHT people this year.

Next year our eight will go out and do the same: win eight and disciple them so that they will go out and win eight more, and so on...

As a team we are asking the Lord of the Harvest to give us 200 laborers this year. These 200 church planters will focus on winning, baptizing, and discipling just eight souls between now and the end of the year. We will train and work closely with these 200 church planters. The task of these 200 is to pray the Lord to give them at least eight new believers this year and repeat the discipleship process in the lives of these new converts.

As each of the 200 focuses on the eight the Lord gives them, the multiplication factor will begin to work for us like leaven in the bread dough:

Year 1: 1600 disciples in 200 new house churches
Year 2: 12,800 disciples in 1,600 house churches
Year 3: 102,400 disciples in 12,800 house churches
Year 4: 819,200 disciples in 102,400 house churches
Year 5: 6,553,600 disciples in 819,200 house churches

At the end of the fifth year, we will have discipled to Christ, not only our entire people group, but 1/2 the total population of the country!

Many are curious about CPM (church planting movements) strategy and if it works or not. What we are describing is a CPM strategy designed for our local context. By faith and with the blessing of the Lord it can be done. We are already a fifth of the way to reaching our goal. It works.

Will you pray with us asking the Lord of the Harvest to give us 200 church planters this year?

Would you pray that Jesus who wills that all men be saved give each of the 200 at least eight souls this year?

Will you pray that these would continue the task of winning, discipling eight/year until the gospel is shared with every person in our assigned people group?

To help you remember to pray, every time you eat a banana or drink coffee (two of Ecuador's best known products) associate these with us and use them as prayer reminders. All that is needed is a short prayer before eating your banana or drinking your coffee. Above you can see what the multiplication process produces. This applies to prayer as well.

That is our strategy. Yes, it's that simple. But it totally depends on God. The only way we know to move God to look down upon this people to save them is through prayer.