CP & Evangelism - Session 4 - Who's There with Bullet Points

before we get started with session 4 please allow me to remind you about the process that we started in session two using Post-it notes to create M post stated in past tense we use smaller Post-it notes like these for the many regular M post that you create such as things like getting a UPS Store mailbox um doing a partnership brochure uh creating a interest meeting or having conducted an interest meeting for team members and then using larger Post-it notes to create your major M poost remember you'll have just a few of those uh it might

be something significant like discipl making Ministry initiated first weekly worship service held or first church planting team sent out remember these M posts are created throughout this course and are necessary for you to complete the final session of this course also remember to write the mile posts in past tense so you write them as if they have already happened so you should be able to create mile poost from each session if you haven't been doing that uh or haven't already done that what I'd like to ask you to do is pause this video now and

look back at your notes or the videos from the previous sessions and make some mile posts be prepared to make new miles posts for today sessions and future sessions as well so let's go ahead and pause take a few moments and create some of those mile poost on your Post-it notes now that you've caught up on your M poost let's move forward with today's session session four which I've entitled who's there this is a lesson in how to exe communities what I mean by asking the question question who's there is that we need to discern

who lives and or works in the communities where we're going to start new churches we want to do this in order to understand how to best serve them and share the gospel with them remember we're not trying to reach people who are already Christians we're not saying that none of them can come to our church but that's not really our focus our Focus about people who don't yet know Jesus we want to build caring relation ships with them and tell them the good news of Jesus Christ so how do we do that in order to

do that most effectively we need to know who's there so we can help them to become new disciples well how we learn who's there is through a process called exting the community Exige means to expound or interpret uh this is a phase or excuse me a phrase that is most often used when we're studying the Bible so today though we're going to use it when talking about a community we want to study something so we can expound or interpret it we want to be intense in the way that we look at a community so we

have a better understanding of who it is how we are who it is we are trying to reach and we want to be able to share what we've learned in a very detailed manner so before I continue I want to point you in the direction of a couple of free church planning resources that I've compiled over multiple decades the first one is a broad collection of resources there's a web link for this which will be on your screen the web link is bit. LCP resources bit. LCP resources CP standing for church planning so this link

will take you to a Dropbox folder that has f folders in it and subfolders and sub subfolders and so on these folders contain more than 6,000 church planning resources and take up more than 8 gigabytes of data so unless you got a lot of room on your computer you may not want to download the whole thing but it's intended to be used as a reference library you can look up different church planning topics as you need them don't try to read it all at once you'll never make it remember it took me decades to put

it together and so it's going to take you a while to look at it so look at it as you need different things but when within this greater Resource One of the subfolders is the larger resource uh which is a course in this larger resource is a course that I've written for Network leaders on how to execute communities so I've made a special web link for you just for that folder it is bit. LX bit.ly Exige in that folder you will find a course that I wrote about how to Exige communities you'll also find some

different examples and and materials and links things like that that you can use if you want to dig into this deeper than we're going in it today we're just going to barely touch this topic because it is so involved uh but read more if it's helpful to you and get a better grasp of what we're talking about so by the way any of these resources I'm giving you you are free to use you are free to share them but do not sell them uh you don't have permission to sell them because some of these were

given to me by other people with the same instruction I can't sell them I give them to you for free you can share them with others for free so now that we've talked about those resources let's get back to our lesson before we explore the present day practical reasons for executing or executing a community we want want to look at what our Biblical motivation is the reality is that if you are a true Christ follower you do not predominantly live by a worldview that is a national worldview or a cultural world worldview you live by

a Biblical worldview or a kingdom worldview by worldview it's the way that you look at things the way you make decisions the way that you interact with people the way that you are a part of society we are not of our supposed to be just of our current language group or people group or nationality we are to be people of the Kingdom of Heaven if we are Christians if we are Christ followers so if you have a Biblical worldview and you are living in the United States or you are part of your culture where you're

living it basically means what scripture calls a being a Stranger in a Strange Land or a stranger in a foreign land it's like you are a citizen of another place beyond the group you're living with 1 Peter 2:9 through1 puts it this way but you are a chosen race a royal priesthood a holy nation a people for his own possession that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of Darkness Into His Marvelous Light once you were not a people but now you are God's people once you had not not receive Mercy

but now you have received Mercy beloved I urge you as sojourners and Exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul we are sojourners and Exiles here on Earth this is not our permanent home in the early 1900s there was a 14-year-old boy named Albert Brumley who wrote a famous song Still famous today in many circles and the song goes this world is not my home I'm just a passing through it's saying this is not where we live this is just where we are right now our home is in

heaven so for those of us who are Christians that's the way it is this is our temporary residence here we are living for Jesus which means we live differently than the world around us John says it this way uh Jesus says it this way in John 17:4 Jesus said I have given you them your word he's talking about God I have given them your word and the world has hated them because they are not of the world just as I am not of the world he's saying this to God I've given the world the word

to my followers and the world hates them because of it just like they hated me uh we are not a part of this place but we are still supposed to live in this place we're not supposed to be isolationists we're to be in the world but not of the world so what is what does that mean well we can be a blessing to the world but we live differently in Jeremiah 29:7 uh it we we learn about uh the nation of Israel when they were in a time of Exile Jeremiah 29:7 says seek the peace

and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into Exile pray to the Lord for it because if it prospers you too will prosper you're praying for the place you are you're praying for the city you live in the state you live in the country you live in you're pray praying for them to be blessed and as they're blessed you're blessed but again you are in Exile there so what does that mean well as we look at this passage this was talking about the nation of Israel when they were in Exile in Babylon

they were taken captive they were prisoners basically under King Nebuchadnezzar but the principle holds true from that time clear to the day we should seek the welfare of those around us well nothing comes close to being as good for the welfare of the people around us as the Gospel of Jesus Christ so what we want to do is execute a community meaning study a community deeply so we better understand who is there and what they're like so we best know how to engage with them and to share the good news of Jesus with them so

how do we do that well there are multiple variations when it comes to studying a community but there are some similarities that go through these different variations so let's look at some of the questions that we should consider as we are studying these communities there's going to be several uh is our study going to be specific to an area that we have already selected for planning a church or is it going to be broad where we're trying to study a big area to figure out where we should plant a church so we we know we

want to plant a church in this one area so we're studying it or we studying this whole big area to try to find out where churches are needed that's the first question we should answer what what are we trying to accomplish the next thing is what type of Community are we studying is it a geographical area like Seattle or Tacoma or Dallas or Orlando or or is it a specific language group or nationality you're trying to reach people that speak Portuguese or Spanish or French or are you trying to reach people that are from certain

countries are you trying to uh reach an affinity group and what we mean by affinity group is people that have things in common such as starting a Cowboy Church for people that like to go horseback riding or trail riding or they working Cowboys or a Collegiate Church that's made up predominantly of college students so is it a geographical people group or a Affinity based Church which one are we looking to do uh another thing that we need to do is are we going to is determine what kind of research we're going to do are we

going to do a preliminary research based study using a computer and other methods or are we going to expand on that research and do what we call a field based study um one the field-based study is one that involves driving place places and walking in places and actually going to the community to look for Visible signs of what's happening in that Community interviewing people in the community with special knowledge so one's basically sitting at a computer and the other one's getting out and meeting with people in studying Community once we've done those studies the next

thing we should figure out is how are the findings to be evaluated how are we going to determine what to do with it is it through dialogue is it through Consultants how are we how are we going to determine what our findings mean and then once we've figured out what they mean how are we going to use them how are those findings going to be utilized is this a study to help us prioritize where we should have church plants uh are are the results going to be put together in a different way that maybe we

can use it to recruit Church planners team members partner churches or is this study designed to help an Outreach in discipl Mak strategy for a community or people group that we already select for the church plant so let's consider some of the possibilities by looking at methods and components that are being utilized the first thing that we want to look at is research-based so a research-based approach is a possible of study that you do at a computer predominately you can also spend some time on the phone maybe but you're researching to gain significant knowledge about

the community of one specific church this proc can process can also be used to learn uh where somebody wants to start several churches and so you do studies on several communities and they can be put together in a variety of ways they can be put on websites or in a notebook or in a brochure for people that are trying to figure out where they're going to plant you've already done a lot of the preliminary work to help them know what the community is like so years ago I created a step-by-step process that would enable would

enable someone who's doing this kind of research to gather information for different communities in the greater Seattle area now you'll be able to find this complete process and some examples in one of the appendices folder under the exoge folder again remember bit.ly Exige look for a folder that says appendices and in there you will find a folder that gives an example of this process so this process can be elaborate but I just want to outline some of the main components for you and then as you look at the guides you can find it more details

now I've I've taken several pages that I used as the guide in this process and put it into one document so you can look through it and kind of see how it works now this this web address is a bit longer uh so here's a link to that process it's bit.ly discovering potential church plants bit. lovering potential church plants so put that all in as one address in your browser and go to it and you will find this document that talks to you about how to do this research kind of approach now uh I want

to make sure you understand at this point I'm teaching you how this process works I am not giving you this process as an assignment as homework to do the study for one city I I did the first one and then taught others how to do it and I am somebody who's experienced in the field even though I'm experienced it took me eight hours of computer work to do the study for one city so I'm not giving you that for homework I just want you to understand how it works so here's how the process happens number

one prayer Pray before during and after you do your research now I know I may be sound sound like I'm repeating myself and the reason is I am repeating myself I've said this to you before and I'll say it again prayer is the priority this is a spiritual process you're researching a community that may have a significant impact on where we planted a church what could be more important what so we need to know what kind of church it should be where it should be who will plant it and how we will engage the community

this is no small task this has Eternal consequences so pray pray for this community and pray for your study as you're going and pray as you're learning new information scripture tells us pray without ceasing this is a good time to do that another thing that we want to look do is we want to look at demographics so demographics are statistical data relating to the population and particular groups within that population there are also a thing called psychographics which dig deeper into how people live where they shop what they do for fun what their priorities are

and so on so as you study demographics and psychographics you start to learn a great deal about the people where they are socio economically what their educational level there's a number of things and what we'll talk more about that in a bit but there are ways that you can dig in to learn more about these people well how do you get these demographics uh you can Google them as one way or use AI to try to find demographics on an area uh you can go to the Census Bureau but you can also uh connect with

agencies like if you're planting with a network or denomination a lot of times they have access to demographics so for example if you're planting a church with the north North American commission board or converge you can contact them to try to get demographics for an area that you you think we need a church plant um you can also look at sources like Wikipedia uh you want to verify some of that as best you can but there's some really good information about different communities on Wikipedia and through Google search so gather that stuff together once you

do study what you found that's what we call the third step which is research study demographics and do web searches to learn as much as you can about the community here's some things that we want you to learn is this community growing or declining in population what are the sizes of the different age groups are there certain languages or nationalities or people groups that are bigger in this community than others so what are their ethnic backgrounds what's their education level have they finished high school college do they have advanced degrees what kind of household is

it is it made up of single people married couples married with ch children single with children alternative Lifestyles who's there uh another thing to look at is what do they do for work are they more what we call Blue Collar they work in service industry or work with their hands a lot or are they more white color professionals they're they're you know and those could be different kinds of whitecar professional they could be teachers but or they could be doctors they could be lawyers or they could be gray collar that's one where somebody maybe has

a white excuse me a blue collar job like being a machinist at Boeing but they make so much money they live like a white color person meaning and that's where the term gray color comes from what do they do for leisure activities what do they do for fun uh what kinds of housing do they have do they live in condos or apartments do they live in duplexes or single family homes um do they own or rent uh it also could be are there people there that are living in college dorms because there's colleges there or

they're living in prison because there's a large prison there which we've had churches start in prisons so we also want to know is this a stable community or a mobile Community is this a place where people come and put down roots and they live a long time or is it a place where they they live for a while and then they move as they they move up in socioeconomic status or maybe they're younger and don't have kids and they're living in a downtown urban area but when they start to have kids that are entering school

they don't want to keep living in that area because maybe the schools aren't the best for those kids so they relocate and so it creates this kind of Mobility instead of stab uh what kind of barriers are there to the gospel or a new church and there's a variety of different kind of barriers there could be a natural boundary like a lake that keeps one part of the community away from another part of the community there can be man-made boundaries there was a church that where I planted a church in a building years ago with

a team and uh we had a building and we were able to have that building because the church that originally met there got cut off from their people because an Interstate was put in and now their people are on the other side of the interstate and they didn't want to cross over to get to this church building so their building became available well that can also affect how we plan a church are there barriers like that that will keep people from Crossing from one side of the community to another another thing that we look at

are traffic patterns they may not be far away from where you wanting to plant a church but if everybody goes the other direction to shop and go to work and stuff you may be on the wrong side of the community for a new church plant that's a man-made barrier uh there's economic barriers um people tend to connect with people that are more like themselves economically it is harder to reach people who are extremely poor because it's hard for them to contribute much they're they're needing so much help that they they're receiving receiving receiving and that

can wear out a church planner it's also hard to reach people that are incredibly rich they tend to be isolated live in gated homes or only uh meet people in their Social Circle so how do you engage those people those are economic barriers there's lifestyle and cultural barriers and so people that are uh in the Northwest we we live in a very diverse area we have incredible outdoor things to do and so a lot of times God's creation actually has people wanting to be out in nature so much that they're harder to reach for a

church or maybe it's their part of a group like a cowboy culture and cowboy cultures on weekends people do rodeos and they go trail riding and they they fix trails and they do all these kinds of activity things so maybe that affects how you plant the church uh many of our cowboy churches actually meet during the week for worship they don't meet on the weekends because the cowboy culture is all doing other stuff on the weekend like a rodeo um another problem is language barriers can you speak their language can you know or do they

worship in English uh are there certain cultural things that are important to them that they won't overcome especially if they don't speak the language you're doing so those are all important kind of things that we need to look at that are possible barriers another question we need to ask is are there sufficient churches uh are there enough churches in the area and if there seems to be a lot of churches are there the right churches in the area to connect with all the different groups that are there Affinity groups and people groups and college students

and so on do we have the right kind of churches in a community another thing to look at when we're studying an area is are there any possible meeting locations uh is sometimes it's hard to Star a church in the area because there's no public place and about the only kind you can start is maybe a house Church which is a valid church but it just affects how you're going to do things so that's all kinds of things that we research now once you've researched this stuff or as you're researching it you want to compile

sources and here's what we mean by that as you're going through and you find some information on a website don't just take down the information and forget about the website copy the web link or the URL and paste it into a document so I'll I'll have a Word document open and I'll research a place and when I find a good website which has some information I will copy the link to that page and paste it in my work document with a little bit of an explanation of what that page is you want to save all

those pages so that when somebody is interested in planning a church in an area they can go back and find all your links and learn more information about the area they don't have to go do all that research that you've already done another part of that is maybe there's something that you came across either it's pictures or or a document that would be really helpful for somebody when they're looking to plant a church in the area well save that as a PDF or an acrobat file if you will and so that we can later on

put that in a master document and we'll talk about that later also collect pictures from the area you can do this online or if you want to go out you've got a camera you can go out and you can take pictures of the community of landmarks of activities that are going on of attractions that are there schools uh fun entertainment that's in the area try to give create a picture or an image of the area for somebody by the pictures that you collect on that Community now once you've done all of that research and you've

got all of those sources we want you to put it together in a compilation and the goal of this process process is to not just get the information but to provide it in a usable format so that people who want to plan a church or who want to partner with the church they can get a good picture of the community and the kinds of churches that are needed there and I'm going to show you some examples of this on the screen but we want to do this through three types of documents uh one of those

is a one-page summary that they can quickly download and review from a website they could we could put it in a notebook or a booklet we could have it on a display table at a school or a conference center and this one page just has a lot of good information and images in a single page where they can read it quickly and get an idea if they're interested in studying it further the second type of document is a three-page summary that includes the one-page summary but also has a page of the web links that you've

been keeping track of and a page of maps to show the focus area for a new church PL so this gives them a bit better a bit broader picture of information in the area the final document includes the complete findings of everything you've discovered during your research this document could be 50 to 100 pages long it includes the three-page summary some detailed demographics with tables and charts and graphs and Maps census information pictures that you've collected and any other pertinent information you gather all this together and it is made into one large PDF document that

people can res request when they want more information about the possible Church Plant now if you're not gifted in designing the one page the three page and the compilation documents that's okay just work together the information collect it all and then get it to somebody who's really good at graphic design let them put it together the other advantage of that is if you've got multiple people working on studies for multiple communities they can all send them to the same design person who make sure that they all look nice and they look uniform they use consistent

language design writing style spelling is checked all those good kind of things are happening those documents that are prepared then can be put together for Distributing through websites and conferences and schools emails one-on-one encounters it's a phenomenal way to raise interest for church plants in your community it could be for one plant or for multiple but specific kinds of church plants that can be done at one point in my Ministry we kept receiving so many inquiries from potential Planters and partners for the same eight church planning locations now remember I told you we had like

150 of them but they all kept inquiring about the same eight I was wondering about that but then I realized it was those eight Church Plant locations that we had posted the summaries the onepage summary and the three-page summary on the website and told them they could contact us to get the complete findings or if they were interested in planting or partnering with the new church so because those were the eight they could quickly find on their own those were the eight that everybody was interested in so these documents actually led to us starting new

churches in these areas because there was such a heightened awareness because of this process the other method for studying communities is what we called a field study the difference between what we just learned about the research-based method and a field study process is that that a research-based process is predominantly done sitting at a computer studying communities where we know we want to start churches a field study process has some preliminary work done at a computer and another research to produce information come up with study guides training and more but it is primarily an in-person study

of a community think like driving or walking and it's an in-person study done by a small or large group of people so over the de years we've had different types of these studies I'm going to name four here a newwork probe the 1684 process a people search and what I'm naming today the Bible Institute payment so let's look at those one of the characteristics that's common among these uh field study processes is that we're trying to gather a substantial about of amount of information about a community including demographics and mapping we're trying to come up

with training that we're going to use to help people go out and study the community we're going to do all that ahead of time but then they're going to come together and they're going to have a leader or a director who makes it happen hopefully with somebody who's the administrator to kind of make all the logistics fall in place and then we'd have somebody maybe it's the leader maybe it's somebody else who's a trainer who trains the these people to go out with guides that help them look at the community and study the community using

field teams the teams are made up of people who are Outsiders who can come look at a community with fresh eyes as well as local people who already know a good bit about the community that an outsider would not know so let's look at some of these different kinds of studies the first one nework probe the nework probe standard format is a one- day event uh here's how it works participants come together usually on a Saturday morning but it could be on a weekday and they receive a brief training session on what their assignments and

Duties are for the day if it's a larger group the teams are divided into multiple teams the big groups divided into multiple teams of four to seven people each maybe as many as eight and then teams are sent out into the community hopefully in a van or a small group could be in a full-size car and they go out in the community to study multiple areas looking for new Ministries and church plants that are needed when we did this in the Seattle area many years ago what we did was we sent out teams to study

areas of about 40,000 people each So within those areas of 40,000 people there were many subcommunities or small neighborhoods or big neighborhoods that made up that area of 40,000 people so they would go study all of the culture and Gatherings of people in that area um the team would go into the community having demographics and maps and a list of questions that they can make observations about and take notes on and fill out reports and Mark where things should be on the map they would look for unmet needs maybe people are doing a lot of

good in the community but what's the specific need that's not being met and they would ask people what those needs might be they would try to identify uh potential meeting places for a new church maybe a school or theater Community Center storefronts libraries Boys and Girls Clubs YMCAs maybe even other churches buildings uh they would try to estimate how many homes and based on that how many people were in the communities some of the places we studied were so new that the demographics said that it was rural with a bunch of house when in fact

there were tens of thousands of new homes in the area where we're going to plant a church they also talk to people that they encounter and seek out people who have greater knowledge about the area they would talk to restaurant owners maybe where they have lunch that day they would connect with pastors of other churches School administrators and Educators talk to Realtors often you can find a showroom where they're showing a whole new development and the person in that room knows as much about the community as anybody because they're trying to sell houses based on

what that Community is like they can talk to city leaders or people at the Chamber of Commerce now going on a Satur can Saturday can sometimes limit these things but you'll also find be surprised how many of these people are still at their work on a Saturday so all those and more they can be studying and so they go out and do this study and drive-thru and talk to people and eat lunch and engage for about four to six hours depending on where they're going and those teams then will come back to the training site

for a time of analysis with their team so when they come back each team meets individually and they summarize the findings that they've had in writing they mark on their uh Maps possible places to meet their map already has the field they've been studying outline so they can they can kind of show where things are in that community and another thing that they do is they then take all their findings and they'll have several summ for several different Church plants and Ministries and they will prioritize those uh they give a meaning like boy we're behind

we need to do this B is this be a good one to do soon and a letter C grade would be some well someday it might be nice if we get to this but it's not as critical of a need and then within those groups they might rank A1 two three and so on it helps us know what they see after praying through the community they've been praying this whole time as they go helps us understand what they see to be the highest priorities in their community and then after all that happens the day hits

the climax all of the teams come together and they pray together about the possible Church plants and then they take turns presenting their findings and they'll stand up there with a map and they'll they'll show their findings and when they do that we project it on a large screen where everybody can see what they're talking about and have a microphone so everybody can hear what they're talking about and they'll tell us about the overall things they do but they found but then they'll come back and say but this is our number A1 priority that we

found the most important priority we have and so it's really an exciting time and it also gets a little competitive in a fun way because the different teams are like no our A1 is the number one priority for everybody and they they kind of make their case for why that's the most important when we do now the first time I did this process with somebody um we had over 100 people split into teams and they were spread out over two Saturdays and when we did this we studied nearly 80% of the greater Seattle area that

area has over 4 million people in it so in those two days we discovered 150 potential church plant locations or people groups or Affinity groups and we these were ones that we felt were already overdue we had 150 that we needed to start yesterday so what happened though is as we went through this whole process of sharing we collectively identified the most important priority for us and it was a rapidly growing under reached community that became our number one priority the place where they were building tens of thousands of new homes and there weren't really

many churches near the area well we worked together and planted that church with a planter and his team and some partners and that church became a church of over a thousand people but we also used conversations from that to start other churches around the same time and over the next few years these studies were put together in books where somebody could come and look through these these field guides that they could study the different communities and see where God was calling them to plant a church so this helped us to raise a great deal of

Interest not only from Planters but from churches that sent their people to do the study some people in some of the churches actually urged their pastors saying why aren't we planting a church and so their Church got involved so that's the nework probe part now the next one I going to tell you about is what we call the 1684 process it's very similar to the Newark probe but has a little bit different connotation in it in this endeavor somebody who leads a network or denomination in the area of church planning would come up with 16

communities that they think might need a church places they don't have churches and they would get people to work with them to help research these communities do the preliminary computer work and research and out of that they would then pray through it and look through it and from the 16 places they looked at they would come up with the eight highest priorities now some of the places they study may not make the list because even though they don't have a church there there are some other groups doing really good Ministry there that have strong churches

so these other communities might not have have any and so they identify the eight highest priorities then they go out and recruit eight churches to prayerfully take one of each of these studies and go do a field study in that community so they do a similar process to what we talked about in the new work probe but when these eight churches go out our hope is that at least half of these or four will take the lead to plan a church in that community and this plan works best when we have a church going out

but we also have somebody go out who's a potential church planner with that team maybe he's from that church or maybe he's somebody else that's just meeting this church for the first time and through this process there's a Synergy they develop a relationship and a calling and a commitment to plant this church together and so our hope is as I said at least four churches will emerge out of that process so that that would be the we've so far got the um nework probe we got the 1684 now I want to talk about a couple

areas that are similar uh that deal with going into more other language groups or nationalities in a community one is called people search and the people search process is pretty simple so you're looking for an international group of people that's relocated to another area this is often referred to as diaspora so this diaspora or this group of people that are that have transplanted maybe to a city in the US um they are living kind of in community or at least know each other even if they're spread out they're all still kind of connected because of

their common Heritage and language so what we will do is send some Specialists who speak the language and we will drop them off in that Community for a week maybe two and say we'll come pick you up at the end and they just go to town they imerge themselves in that community and they connect with people and they find out who are leaders in the community they find out um people who are open to a church or have been praying for a church they find a possible meeting location they do a variety of things to

just Stir It Up and it may even happen after that week that by the end there's a new church already started and maybe even an leader identified or maybe a leader is brought in from the outside so this is a great process where in just a week or two a new church can get off the ground very similar to that is what I'm calling today the Biblical Institute payment uh the Biblical Institute payment or bit for short is a variation of the people search and and here's what I mean by this uh years ago and

still going on to this day there's a man named Ivan Montenegro he's he was a church planner and a network leader he's on my team now and he leads our Hispanic church plan ing in the Northwest and years ago when he was kind of getting this going he connected with another guy who was on our team named Brian Harper who is multilingual Brian speaks English Spanish I think French Arabic I don't know what all he speak he speaks a number of languages may be wrong in the French but a bunch of languages and always learning

new stuff so he worked with Ivan to start a Biblical Institute to train members of Ivan's churches to become Church planters pastors and other church leaders and uh uh most of these students um in the school in the school the Biblical Institute worked low-income jobs they couldn't um they couldn't afford to pay for their schooling but it was important that they invested in the school so that they understood this school was valuable so they didn't pay money but here's what they did pay so on the first Friday and evening uh Friday evening and Saturday of

the month the students would gather together for training and how to study the Bible how to preach how to share their faith how to run Church administration how to baptize people how to do a funeral all those kinds of things in order to pay for this training they showed up on the second Friday and Saturday of month of the month in a certain town they would pick the town and all of them would come together and descend on this town where a number of Hispanics lived and they would go to businesses and community gathering places

they would knock on doors and they would share the gospel and pray for people and tell them about a new church they are starting and many times before the weekend was over they had a new church they just all descended on one weekend did it together and there was a new church and then they had a leader who was already there that was going to be the pastor of that church and before that weekend was over they would gather together and have their first worship service together and they would do this church after church Community

after community so these processes of people search and bip as I was calling it the Biblical Institute payment are based on the concept of finding a person of Peace as identified in the Gospel of Luke in chapter 10 it says this beginning with verse one after this the Lord appointed 72 others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go he told them the Harvest is plentiful but the workers are few ask the lord of the Harvest therefore to send out workers into this Harvest

field his Harvest field go I am sending you out like Lambs Among Wolves do not take a purse or bag or sandals and do not greet anyone on the road whenever you enter a house first say peace to this house if someone who promotes pieces there your peace will rest on them if not it will return to you st stay there eating and drinking whatever they give you for the worker deserves his wages do not move around from house to house when you enter a town and are welcome eat what is offered to you heal

the sick if who are there and tell them the kingdom of God has come near to you but when you enter a town and you are not welcome go into its streets and say even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you yet be sure of this the kingdom of God has come near you I tell you it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than that for that town so what is this saying to us he's saying the kingdom of God has come near to you

and the people will respond uh but how do they respond well part of how they respond is that person of peace and by person of peace is peace doesn't just mean the absence of War peace meaning somebody who's a connector an influencer in the community that brings about Harmony this person of peace is often referred to as the Lydia principal based on what we find in Acts 1611 and following where it talks about Lydia Lydia was the seller of purple she was one of the women who gathered down by the worship to uh Down By

The River To Worship together on the on the Lord's day and even though she wasn't a Christian she worshiped god with these others and when she met Paul and his companions she beged beg them please come to my house be my guest and let me provide for you while you're here so she did what we just heard about back in Luke she invited them in when they came and said please please be here she was a connector she was a person of Peace in the community a person of peace is quite often not a Christian

but they are Hospital hospitable they're open and they're a connector to the Greater Community and I tell you it's the dream of every Church planner who has a clue what he is doing to find at least one person of Peace in the community where God has called him to plan that person of Peace moves the ministry along so much faster than not having it so as we conclude our session today let me sum up by giving you the benefits of exting the communities here's here's the the things that I want you to think about number

one it helps us spiritually discern where God is leading us to plan a new church or churches number two it helps us learn about the people of each of these communities and how best to serve them evangelize them disciple them develop them as leaders and then deploy them out to do it all over again number three it becomes a great recruiting tool for church Planters team members and partners as we put together the materials we found it it excites them to read about the possibilities that are out there number four it motivates churches to get

involved in church planning and help them be more Discerning in how they can serve and reach their own Community you have the churches help you do this process and they see the need and get excited about how God could use them to fulfill it and number five we do it because it is an effective tool for joining God in what he is doing to expand the kingdom of heaven we want to find where God is at work and join him so I encourage you today let's get out there and do it