Church Planting Movement

Church Planting Movement is a term used by evangelical missions organizations including Free Will Baptists and Southern Baptists to indicate a tactic of growth in which indigenous churches plant more churches within a people group or geographic area. A church will sponsor formation of multiple spinoff churches that will themselves very quickly reproduce new churches, generally with common teachings and doctrine. It is different from traditional missions in that the new churches are generally started by a lay leader from the sponsoring church and not an outside missionary. A key characteristic of an authentic church planting movement is the rapidity with which a new congregation itself starts another similar church.
History
The modern Church Planting Movement can trace its roots to the mid-nineteenth century when Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson developed the three-self formula of an indigenous missions policy: "they believed that young churches should be self-propagating, self-supporting, and self-governing from their inception." Donald McGavran, a missionary in India who "coined the concept of 'people movements' to Christ," is credited as an early proponent of the kind of missionary work that underlies the Church Planting Movement, by focusing his missionary work on converting groups of people ("groups, tribes, villages, ethnic groups") rather than individuals.
According to ONE Magazine, the official organ of the National Association of Free Will Baptists, such tactics were used successfully in Cuba in the 1940s by Tom and Mabel Willey; in the 1950s in North India Carlisle and Marie Hanna; and in the 1960s in Ivory Coast by LaVerne Miley.
Essentials
There are three key characteristics of a Church Planting Movement: it reproduces rapidly, multiplying churches, and that the churches are indigenous.
*Within a very short time, newly planted churches are already starting new churches that follow the same pattern of rapid reproduction. Though the rate varies from place to place, Church Planting Movements always outstrip the population growth rate as they race toward reaching the entire people group. Where with other methods of church planting it may take five years to plant a church, with CPM multiple generations of churches may be planted within five months. Most churches in the middle of a Movement will start as many churches as they can, with a goal of filling the area with new churches.
Methods
There is not a solitary method used to spark a Church Planting Movement. The Training for Trainers (T4T) method has been successful in China. It differs from the Insider Movement in that leaders do not seek to act like indigenous persons, but simply train locals who train others within their (or closely related) people group.

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