From: Joel News

Simple church coach Felicity Dale attended the World House Church Summit in India and reports that she met several people who have more than 100,000 new believers in their networks. She interviewed a middle-aged housewife who is responsible for seeing more than 6,000 churches. Reflecting on this, Felicity says: "I know that numbers are the world's way of judging success, and that God is more interested in our faithfulness and obedience than anything else. I also know that you cannot manufacture a move of God. But are there principles that they are applying that translate across cultures and help to produce such a movement?"

The first thing that is strikingly clear is the commitment of Indian church planters to prayer and prayer walking. "We have an Indian friend who tried an experiment," Felicity says. "He picked two villages. The first he prayer walked regularly before trying to reach out to the people who lived there. The second he did not. Forty-five families became believers in the first village. He was thrown out of the second one."

A similar experiment was tried several years ago in Phoenix, Arizona, as documented in the book 'The Praying Church Idea Book' by Douglas A. Kamstra. The church randomly selected 160 names from the phone book and divided then into two groups. For 90 days they prayed for one group while they ignored the other. At the end of 90 days they called all 160 homes, identified themselves and offered to stop by and pray for the family and any needs they might have. Of the 80 homes that were not prayed for, only one person invited them in. From the 80 homes that were prayed for, 69 people invited them to come over and of those people, 45 invited them into their homes.

David Watson, who has seen more than 40,000 churches start in North India and more than 5,000 in Africa, surveyed his top 100 church planters to see if he could identify any common characteristics in the methods they used. The only one he found was a commitment to prayer. Even though these people mostly had jobs, they prayed 3 hours per day on their own and then 3 hours per day with their teams. Fasting was also important to them.

Source: Felicity Dale

For the 6th time, a German Round Table for Church Planting met on March 15-16 in Dorfweil near Frankfurt. This "invitation-only" consultation brings together twice a year the Church Planting leaders and responsibles of all German denominations and movements. 

Last year, author Michael Frost (Austalia) consulted with the Round Table about missional church planting. This year, Ovind Augland gave a report of the DAWN Church Planting process in Norway and Scancinavia. The German Church Planting leaders are now actively evaluating ways to move forward more strategically towards a Church Planting vision for Germany.

The coordinating team of the German Round Table is Erhard Michel (FEG), Jason Holm (GEM), James Ros (BFP) and Reinhold Scharnowski (DEN).

Zimbabwe planted 10000 new churches in 10 years. And now? Read this first hand.