INTEGRATION OF FOCUS GROUPS

                                                                Pastor Kumar reported on the church planting group.
      

Questions for Pastor Kumar from his report:

BRYAN: In your development program, how many years did you find in Chennai it took for a church to reach the seventh level?  Secondly where do daughter churches come out of this?

KUMAR:  My observation is limited to Chennai but what we have seen is that five or six cell groups are formed within one year and the second year Sunday morning services begin (with some saved and some unsaved people).  In Chennai what we do even though there are only three or four groups we will have a Sunday service.  In our group the husband and wife missionaries must conduct Sunday services.  Two for a common congregation of thirty people, maybe another two years until the group becomes 100, and then the five fold ministries may appear.  Here we sometimes do have daughter churches evolve.  Sometimes there will be an assistant to the pastor who cannot wait and will go start another church.  God will never allow any laborer’s tears or prayers to go unanswered.  Usually daughter churches come in the third or fourth year.  After that I have seen churches take two streams: some go only to evangelism and never look at community transformation.  It depends upon the church planter’s heart.  But there are some pastors who are really connected with the needs of the people, so out of compassion he goes into transformation more than evangelism.  Sending missions happens all through.  Usually by five or six years, church will have 150 to 300 people, with Sunday school or day school or literacy program.  In Chennai the NGOs are very strong, and don’t work with churches, so churches must go to the NGOs and ask them to work together. 

ROD: with all respect to the church planting in Chennai, and all that Kumar has seen, my observation regarding timeline and growth is when you start there are church groups and there are church planting movements, which are two different things.  Church planting movements take quite a while to start; in Delhi when we started in 1992 we would go to people and tell them of our cell groups and they would call us a heresy and say we shouldn’t exist in Delhi.  But now there are eighteen pastors and cell groups networked together.  When we started in 1992 it took us 1 ½ years to baptized our first 23 believers.  The first were not willing to be believed.  19992 to 1999 we were only able to have 47 cell groups, but then by 2000 we had 83 cell groups and now we have 300 cell groups and many baptized.  Initially there are all sorts of troubles, but when it begins to move we can feel it in a wave like way, like the river in Ezekiel 47.  It starts only ankle deep but becomes a river which no one can cross.  So we can’t really frame the movement of the Holy Spirit in specific time pockets.  It doesn’t happen that way.  The church planting movement is exponential growth.

ARTHUR: while there are various aspects of church growth, there are also certain groups within India who evaluate the QUALITY of church growth to make sure that it takes place along with the quantity of growth. 

BRYAN: in all our strategies for growth, we have to be concerned with the quality of growth as well.  I worked with a pastor in Jakarta who had a part-time pastoring activity, and his church was 600 people but he didn’t feel like it was growing well.  He had 12 deacons, and it was exposed to him that his attitudes about the deacons was limiting the church.  Looking at the church he found 120 people capable of being deacons, and commissioned them to lead house churches, and within six years the church grew to 12000.  Now they have 75000, and many more in other cities.  After deacons led house churches for five years or so they were sent out to other cities as elders to start new house churches around Indonesia, and now the pastor has lost count of everyone he has sent out and where they are.  Of five denominations in Indonesia, they have all grown 15 times each year for the past 15 years.  This is astonishing considering the persecution of Christians in Indonesia. 

I believe that our church growth has to be character based, and the New Testament is very clear on the qualifications for leaders.

Dave Von Stroh reported about the Land Rights group.

Questions:

RUTH:  I would like to  thank the group for this analysis.  One very important thing has been left out, that any issue of land is always a structural issue, which ahs to do with the overall structure of the society.  If  this is a land where everything is distributed unevenly, then you find unequal and immoral distribution and unhealthy alliances of the different power structures of a country, and then policies are formulated from these alliances.  These policies become programs that tend to leave out the poor and marginalized, who for centuries have also been marginalized by society.  The design of these programs would tend to leave out rather than allow people to have access to land.  This is structural in its problems.  Then if you have programs that exclude, then you end up with the problems like we have in the Philippines. 

We need a macro analysis, and any program or activity has to have multiform approaches.  One at the macro level, looking at policies and relationship and practices.  The other approach is look at the programs and how programs are designed, how the management is run.  The other approach is building up from below, so that people are aware and know the policies and structures. 

Is this a hopeless case?  I think that if we are to address and issues, we have no way bur to address the amcro structures, policies and programs.  The legal basis for all of this.  A man in the Philippines came up with a  program that did no have enough support from the masses, so even though he was able to get land from the government he did not have support he is now getting out of the government, and the urban land reform law is getting watered down and negated by other laws that tend to contradict.  My own thesis is that it has to be approached in different levels, and it has to be integrated, consistent and long term.  All with the grace of God.

JEAN-LUC: I just wanted to back up what Ruth said, with a concrete example that we’ve seen in Honduras.  A group of Association for a More Just Society ahs been working at the grassroots with churches addressing local land rights issues, but they’ve moved beyond and are now involved in writing policies and legislation coming through government.  Right now the fruit companies that want access to ancestral lands of indigenous groups are pushing through terrible bills, but the AMJS and other NGOs are now lobbying and getting their ideas put into legislation and the discussion area.

KUMAR: I just want to share my observation about the sacredness of land.  I do not fully understand the way we are talking about land as a gift from God and we should give respect for that.  Some places we must give it importance and give it a sacred place?  Are you talking about a building or a community?

DAVE: I think any place, to have a rootedness.

RAINEER:  I think we are basically talking about a focus or a special pint where the invisible and the presence of God manifests itself in the physical world.  I think it is trying to bridge the gap between the thinking that what survives is the soul and the work of God, but what we’re saying is the physical expression is what gives meaning to our understanding.  The land itself is part of our blessedness.

KUMAR: if that is so, we have some basic problems with that.  Our understanding is that when Christ died on the cross, the delimitation of God’s presence took place.  The early church did not limit God to temples or tabernacles, but that people became God’s temple.  I come from a  Pentecostal church where when we walk into the building, we cannot distinguish whether we are in the church or in heaven.  But then after the benediction, people change and become not so holy.  So we are trying to fight against the idea that God is only inside the church building, which causes people to turn into one person inside the building and another person outside the building.  So we want to focus on the human being as a temple of God.

RAINEER:  I think just to clarify it is true that maybe from the Reformation this very li8berating idea of the boundarilessness of God is a good thing, but it is also equally true that there is a focus of the manifestation of the sacredness and the presence of God in the physical realm.  I think our major difficulty is in embracing both rather than making them mutually exclusive.

ARTHUR: there was one statement that you must invest in the and even if you might lose all the land.  This seems like very poor financial advice.  You should invest your money in a place where there is no risk.

RODERICK: Just a curiousity: land thing in our urban areas and major cities is all connected to the land mafia.  What do we do?  Have we really thought through about it?  They have bought politicians, they have bought the legal system.  How do we really handle this issue?

RAFAEL: just another thing, thinking of the experience of some people in Brazil.  The government gave them land a a small house that was very comfortable.  But because the people didn’t have the ability to pay for things, they took pieces of their houses and started selling them to have money for survival.  There was also a problem of paying for taxes.

JUN: I think the land rights issue is not only structural, not only national, but also personal and international issue.  Look at the case of the Palestinians and Israel.  If this issues not being addressed right there will be no peace in the land.  The poor are willing to die for apiece of land, but they are powerless and they need to be empowered by Christians.  Now we can address the issue by being in solidarity with the poor, organizing them.  This is a political issue and it is supposed to be addressed from this perspective.  They are voiceless and we need to give them a voice.  so it must be addressed from both levels because people are greedy.

BRYAN: I’d like to see the stewardship of land developed as a concept.  I believe that as human beings we can’t create land, we can just be good stewards of it.  The other thing for the sacred issue, as a postmodern Westerner, I had similar views as to what God is saying, but when you go into places like prayer mountains in Korea you realize that when you dedicate specific places to specific functions, the manifestation of God can be so much greater.

RUTH: I think this is just a reaction to Arthur’s comment about investment.  I think my interpretation of investing in the land is making that land productive while you are there.  Making it drain, making the sanitation better so that you are not dying of diarrhea and other diseases.  I say that we need to do that, because even if we have had experiences of working with a community that we

JEAN-LUC: talking about the sacredness of the land.  I was up in west Africa, and in the north east was Muslim.  The Muslims would get out their prayer mats no matter where they are and pray in public, make that space of land sacred for a moment.  What spirituality would it be to buy plots of land in our slums and make them public prayer gardens, so that the people see that we pray?

DAVE: one thing to add to this discussion.  What about capitol and lending and repossessing?  How can we live out Jubilee in life?  Is that something that we as Christians are to seek out, or is it to be institutional or how can we integrate that with land rights.

Bryan and Corrie report from the training commission.

7.  Nowhere to get the resources from, also where do we keep the resources.

9. Oversight and approval of training content.  There needs to be acceptance in the network of the training content.
10. Building a database of existing courses of urban poor training.  LELOC.  Also one program run from TearFund that was stopped due to lack of funding.
11. Relating to existing universities and seminaries who offer urban training so that we can set up mutual dialogue to help shape what we are doing and also to influence them.

I just wanted to underline that we spent a lot of time on the issue of contextualization,  that we need to facilitate the process in which we allow the different regions of the world can develop courses that are applicable to them.  So we need to figure out the core concepts.

Maybe at the initial grassroots course there needs to be a certain level of Biblical knowledge which can handle the idea of the transformation approach.  If you have no Biblical understanding, you don’t know how to come up with ideas from the stories.
Entry into the grassroots course could be hindered by a lack of secondary education.

VIV: I think at the foundation we’re talking about global input from multiple continents on each subject.  That’s global.  And then we’re talking about facilitators who will focus on contextualization.  So at the course design, must be designed somewhere, and get info from different contents.  The instructions for the facilitators must be in such a way that they are able to contextualize.  The essential element is the training of facilitators.  We will meet together on each continent, the trainers, in some manner.  What we’re doing here is really training each other in a consultative storytelling process.

KUMAR: just as you formally mentioned, the ba course and ma course, I would like you consider formally endorsing non-formal courses.

RUTH: pardon me if this comment because of my lack of knowledge.  I think any training would have some bias, wouldn’t it?  So I think that bias has to be very clear and must be the one that makes the whole program and courses distinctive from other courses.  I think we need to be very clear of the educational philosophy just as with the theology.  In terms of methodology, I think that could also be very much articulated in that this is with practical tools and methods.  This must be articulated so that it is consistent with our values and biases.

RODERICK: Do you think we need research on what kinds of trainings are already available?  If ast all research was carried on and then we examined the needs, we could plan according to that. 

BRYAN: this group may be small, but Viv has had lots of conversations around the world about this, and there is not much we don’t know. 

VIV: I agree with both of you.  We’ve done some ad hoc analysis, but it would be good to have someone do a much more detailed analysis.  I think what we will find is that most of us do ad hoc training.  I think the knowledge is among us, maybe there is a little more stuff out there, but we need someone to take that on as a research project. 

RODERICK: If we analyse on a regional level, I think that would be helpful to find out what exists in the field.  Then we have a powerful document of what already exists out there and what we need to learn.

KUMAR: we only need expectations, methodologies, and trainers….I think we need to move on from always talking, and take the input from others, and not worry about creating a fool proof method.  We need to take some action now.

JEAN-LUC: again to back up what you are saying, I think if you don’t do the meta-evaluation of the quantifiable outcomes of the training, it will be difficult to get more funding and also to get upper level institutions to work with this process.  People today speak numbers, and you need to deliver numbers.  So you need to show the effectiveness of this training, and many things will fall into place much easier in terms of funding and finding the institutions to support it.

RAFAEL: I think if we continue to see lots of results, more people will be drawn to this program.

© Viv Grigg & Urban Leadership Foundationand other materials © by various contributors & Urban Leadership Foundation,  for The Encarnacao Training Commission.  Last modified: July 2010