The Missiological Heresies That Won't Go Away
Missions is the land of the new and novel. Consequently, many things happen in missions that would not happen in environments of tighter scrutiny. Church Planting Movements are the definition of new and novel. This article looks briefly at a recent book by the founder of Church Planting Movements, and presses on the key issues that undergird and typify CPM.
It’s easy for us to live in a bubble. My work, my family, my church, the Padres, the Michigan Wolverines. And when we dare, we watch a bit of news even though it messes with our disposition way too much.
There are enough troubling issues swirling these days, and none of us wants to look into areas that don’t firsthand affect us. Tax season will be here soon enough, so do I really need to think about what missions method “Bob, Gail, Linda, and Frank” are using in India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh to do their missionary work? You might dismiss it with, “Let them go, they’re good people!”
If the consequences of these methods weren’t so eternally high, I would tend to agree. Even now, many are saying, “Aren’t these just semantic nuances, and don’t these methods serve to make disciples and move the Kingdom of God forward?” Oh, only if that were so. I’ve got enough to do and don’t enjoy taking time to joust at windmills or strain out gnats. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case, and two issues in particular are pushing me to again write on this topic.
The first issue is a book recently published by David Garrison, Inside Church Planting Movements. At this point, let me back up. Up until the publication of No Shortcut to Success: A Manifesto for Modern Missions, there was an unending stream of books devoted to advancing the new wave of modern shortcut methods. The first of these that took the missions world by storm was Church Planting Movements, also written by David Garrison. Then came Miraculous Movements, then Contagious Disciple Making, and then came Stubborn Perseverance. All these books filled large swathes of the missions world with high expectations of amazing numbers of souls coming to faith in Christ and churches that would continuously and naturally multiply. The methods used to see such successes consisted of Disciple Making Movements (DMM), Church Planting Movements (CPM), and, at times, Insider Movements (IM). There were other ideas buried within those methods, such as Person of Peace, Discovery Bible Study (DBS), Obedience-Based Discipleship, Four Fields, Business for Transformation (B4T), and some others, but mostly they went back to the ideas found within DMM, CPM, and IM.
Then came the publication in 2022 of No Shortcuts and the flow of such books stopped...for a while. Did those methods go away? Not at all, but with the exposure that No Shortcuts provided, the discussion took a major sea change. In No Shortcuts these methods were exposed, and vague terms were finally outlined for what they actually meant. In the aftermath of No Shortcuts many of DMM’s terms became understood by a growing group of churches; thus, some attempted to introduce new methods like ‘Four Fields,’ which is a basic rehash of DMM using different terminology. Discussions had by the proponents got quieter, and one could have easily thought surely that the wave of such methods had passed.
That was not the case, and the publication of Garrison's new book makes this abundantly clear as he outlines the continued use of DMM and CPM in particular with a vast variety of organizations utilizing those methods. His list includes Frontiers, Pioneers, International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, Wycliffe Bible Translators, YWAM, The JESUS film project and many others.
While most books espousing these new methods are silent when it comes to offering a definition of a church, Garrison does put one forward on page 8. But when earlier in his book he claims, “The report from a Latin American country indicated a decade of growth from 229 churches in 1989 to a staggering 3,258 churches in 1998,”it beggars the imagination to see those churches matching up to the definition put forward on page 8. Why is it that similar movements aren’t happening anywhere in North America, where honest evaluations can be and are easily done by those who speak the same language? A common response to this has been that the hardness of North Americans is epic in our post-Christian age, to which I would counter that, if that is true, try to measure the resistance of a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Animistic mind and see if they are any different or easier! No man seeks after God; human hearts are resistant to faith in Christ. It is always a work of God to open the unregenerate mind. So why does God seemingly have a unique love for the people of South America or Southeast Asia, and thus movements only happen in locations where clear verification done by same language evaluators is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve? Just the issue of raising up and training capable leaders takes time. There’s just no way around that reality; Paul is crystal clear in 1 Timothy 3:6 regarding the issue that real churches have real, measurable leaders.
Later, on page 20, Garrison admits that finding elders from movements of new disciples “is practically an oxymoron.” But without those elders, how do churches spring to life and maintain clarity on the gospel and other issues that lead to growth and maturity?
Chapter 3 of Garrison's book is devoted to the criticisms the author says are being leveled at CPMs. Most of these are straw men, a couple are serious critiques, and some I’ve never heard of. Sadly, Garrison carefully avoids the actual criticisms. Here are my top seven critiques.
- Buried within the DBS format, the leader of the study (who does not need to be a believer) is encouraging unsaved people to obey God, thus the term “Obedience-Based Discipleship.” Flipping the historic work of seeing the non-believer hopelessly lost, thus leading to salvation, to a place now where, in his unsaved state, he can do works of obedience to please God.
- Within DMM, the actual teaching of God’s word itself is downplayed. Miraculous Movements says, “Do not teach or preach. Instead, facilitate discovery and obedience. When people are simply exposed to the scriptures, God will reveal the truth to them.” Where in the New Testament do we see Paul facilitating a discussion? Paul’s leadership in teaching the word of God is constant.
- The blurring of the term “evangelism" has been phased out (what Christians historically have termed bringing unsaved people to Christ), and “discipleship” is now common. Bringing an unsaved person to a deep sense of his need for a Savior is historically called evangelism. Encouraging the new convert to obey God’s Word and grow in His Word is discipleship. To blur that difference has serious consequences.
- “Groups self-correct. We see this happen frequently when groups measure themselves by the requirements of scripture,” Miraculous Movements says. Absolute confidence in self-revelation and self-correction is unquestioned within DMM/CPM.
- A strict adherence to the Person of Peace/Man of Peace approach, even sometimes making it the priority in missions.
- A consistent downplaying of the need for language and culture fluency.
- Extremely weak and naïve assessments of the work done by CPM/DMM practitioners, as I will get into a little later on.
Those are just a few of the concerns that Garrison avoids addressing.
Garrison has a very high level of confidence in the findings of the CPM assessment teams that have travelled extensively trying to verify what has happened. But buried within their conclusions is a high level of naivety, as witnessed by just one contradiction. Inside CPMs notes, “The assessment team’s qualitative findings were insightful. When asked whether some believers had returned to Islam, 91.7 percent of the informants said ‘no’.” Yet Don Little wrote, “In his discussion of CPM’s among Muslims instigated through the Camel Method, Kevin Greeson makes this disturbing, and confirming observation: ‘Throughout the history of missionary outreach to Muslims, reconversion has been a consistent problem, with as many as 90 percent returning to Islam.’” Is there room for some disparity of figures? Again and again, the advocates of CPM/DMM seem exceedingly naïve and trusting in the findings they are given. The evaluators must rely on locals for all their investigations because knowing the local languages of the people they are investigating is well beyond the ability and time such evaluators have to press into the conversions and ‘churches’ they are evaluating.
Much of the rest of Garrison’s book goes on with similar rosy assessments of CPMs by folks who seemed to be predisposed to see what is extremely difficult to quantify and validate.In North America, people using similar methods, such as Launch Global, who were convinced of the CPM/DMM model, tried for years to use those methods among enclaves of Muslim migrants in college towns. Finally, they gave up that effort. “But it’s working over there” was the continuous report I got from those eager young college students.
I mentioned at the beginning of this article that there were two reasons I’m writing this report. One has been outlined above: DMM/CPM have not gone away, they are not going away, and that is eternally tragic for the hundreds of thousands who have heard and embraced some truncated view of the gospel…but not the true gospel. They’ve added it to their existing worldview, living out a syncretized life, and believing the whole time that they are good with this new god. Without fluency on the part of the communicator, that will be the overwhelming result with few exceptions.
The other reason this is being written now is that gospel workers going overseas with the agencies mentioned, and others, are finding themselves, once on the field, awash in organizations that have set aside historic methods. The International Mission Board (IMB) is at the top of this list in some of the areas they work in, though thankfully not all. Discouraged workers are coming home after 5, 10, 15 years where speed-driven methods alone are used and encouraged. The loss of lost souls to this disastrous distortion of the gospel is beyond tragic. The loss of godly gospel workers, who found out too late that this is what their agency was doing, is also too sad for words. Many had no training in historic methods of language acquisition, clear gospel communication, the development of real disciples, and planting churches. Those workers are nearly impossible to replace, and the discouragement this brings to the churches that sent them is hard to calculate. All roads don’t lead to Rome. Ideas have consequences and words matter. Heaven is real, and so is Hell.
Churches must take these matters seriously. There is no place for rose-colored glasses in the world of missions. The eternal stakes for those that Christ has commanded us to reach could not be higher.
For the Radius team,
Brad Buser