Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Talking about Movements and CPM “Dangers”

An article recently released at Desiring God titled, What Could Be Wrong with ‘Church Planting’? Six Dangers in a Missions Strategy provides a nice anecdote of some of the problematic issues in talking about movements today.

In the introduction, the author remarks that:

…by his grace, God used me to start a movement that helped plant churches.

But he then attempts to refute “church planting movements.”  Basically, he has started a movement that helped plant churches but he is against church planting movements. Let that sink in for a moment.

There were several misunderstandings and inaccuracies in his argument and portrayal of CPM/DMM, but that is for another post. The author concludes:

Missionary fads come and go. Clear proclamation of gospel truth in the context of healthy biblical churches will last until Jesus returns.

I am not an apologist for DMM, although I believe the approach is more biblically and missiologically sound than the author portrays it. Indeed, no strategy is perfect. We will not shy away from these issues in Motus Dei.

However, I’m more curious about his approach to talking about “movements” in this article. I take him at his word that God used him to start a “movement” that helped plant churches. Why can’t we talk about that?

What is the nature of this movement? What is its scope? How did it begin? What were the factors that contributed to its success? What was his strategy? How did they network? What is the vision of the movement? How did new people join? What sustained it? What were the socio-contextual factors in that context that potentially facilitated its emergence? How did it relate to context? How did the community view it? What changes happened in society as a result? Is it still continuing today? What would they do differently if they could start over? Etc.

From my perspective, our missions community would have been better served by his own empirical case study, rather than simply warning people of the “dangers” of a strategy that appears to be misunderstood and has plenty of positive case studies of its own.

“If you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another” (Gal. 5:15).

To be fair, it was a short blog post. We are free to criticize error when we see it.

But to the extent that this article criticizes movements, I don’t think we’re quite there yet. Our missiological discourse on movements needs to go deeper and wider. We still have much to discover, complex issues to unravel, unity in Christ to maintain, and unengaged nations to disciple.