Missions and missionaries are all about church planting.

There are many missions activities and many projects that a missionary is involved in but the greatest focus in missions should be that of world evangelization and church planting.

I really like this definition of “Christian mission” from wikipedia.com

A Christian mission has been widely defined, since the Lausanne Congress of 1974, as that which is designed “to form a viable indigenous church-planting movement.” This definition is motivated by a theologically imperative theme of the Bible to make God known, as outlined in the Great Commission. The definition is claimed to summarize the acts of Jesus‘ ministry, which is taken as a model motivation for all ministries.

New Church plant

The Christian missionary movement seeks to implement churches after the pattern of the first century Apostles. The process of forming disciples is necessarily social. “Church” should be understood in the widest sense, as an organization of believers rather than simply a building. Many churches start by meeting in houses.

Church planting by cross-cultural missionaries leads to the establishment of self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating assemblies of believers. This is the famous “three-self” formula invented by Henry Venn of the London Church Missionary Society in the 19th century. Cross-cultural missionaries are persons who accept church-planting duties go to people outside their culture, as Christ commanded in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).

However, Christian missions can more broadly mean any activity in which Christians are involved for world evangelization.

In addition to theological doctrine, many missionaries promote economic development, literacy, education, health care and orphanages, believing these causes advance the glory of God. Christian doctrines (such as the “Doctrine of Love” professed by many missions) may permit the provision of aid without requiring religious conversion.

read more or get further information: Evangelism and Christianization

The wikipedia is not a Bible so I cant really preach from it but it does cover 3 points that I always emphasis in Missions With Purpose ministry:

1. Making Disciples- I like the house meeting church plant idea
2. Establishing indigenous Churches- self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating assemblies of believers
3. In addition to fullfilling the great Comission through world evangelization secondary activities and methods for ministry which our missions Ministry covers in the PEACE plan

I’ve told you all of that as a prerequisite to some great news.

On Saturday, January 3rd. We started the year off right by officially planting our first church of the New Year. That’s the goal of Missions.

We traveled to a remote Indian village near Cancuc Centro, Chiapas, Mexico with the Tzeltal Indians. We prayed for the leader of the new plant and even prayed over the place where we would like to build a new building for the church to occupy.

Here are some of the photos from our recent church plant celebration:

www.flickr.com purposemission’s First Church plant for 2009 photoset