As we head into 2024, here are our top 5 most read posts of 2023!

1. Why Be Barnabas?
2. 625 Days and Talia’s Story
3. Lessons from Cancer: Suffering Leads to Surrender
4. Team Conflict
5. Lessons from Cancer: Surrender the Self to the Point of Death

We have a lot on deck for next year, including the last few posts for the Be Barnabas series, as well as other posts about personal and team thriving. In 2024, we hope to connect with even more missions leaders to learn from and share lessons with; we’d love to connect with you personally! Please reach out at contact@missionsleaders.com. We hope you have a great Christmas / New Year’s season!

We hope this poem from Amy Carmichael will encourage you to continue in the way of Jesus, even through all of the ups and downs.

Thy Way is Perfect by Amy Carmichael

Long is the way, and very steep the slope;
Strengthen me once again, O God of Hope.

Far, very far, the summit doth appear;
But Thou art near, my God, but Thou art near.

And Thou wilt give me with my daily food,
Powers of endurance, courage, fortitude.

Thy way is perfect; only let that way
Be clear before my feet from day to day.

Thou art my Portion, saith my soul to Thee,
Oh, what a portion is my God to me!

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In the last couple of posts, we’ve heard from some guest contributors about who Barnabas was from the Bible and what he did to find and partner with Paul to catalyze multiplication in the 1^st Century. This gives us some foundational principles about who we should try to embody as we approach Being Barnabas in pursuing movements.

From here, we’ll start to walk through the different stages of finding and partnering with a National Apostolic Visionary (NAV). But before we start with what to do, we need to focus on who we’re looking for. We’ll start with breaking down the term, and then look at some characteristics of a NAV.

“National” (or “Near Culture”)

Firstly, the movement leader needs to be a near-culture or cultural insider. So we can use the word ‘national,’ but ‘near-culture’ also works – the NAV may come from another country that is in the same region and has a similar cultural background. We’ve touched on the importance of why the key leader should be a cultural insider in previous posts, but it boils down to the reality that the vast majority of movements are started and led by national or near culture leaders with the support and coaching of outsiders.

However, if we think about ‘why’ this might be the case, there are a few different reasons. Among the unreached, outsider workers, especially from the West, have very little credibility as messengers of the gospel. Language and culture are also significant barriers in our ability to communicate the gospel in a contextually appropriate way.

However, as the church has grown in the global South and globalization allows for increased international travel, Christian workers from the West can have an inherent credibility in training and providing resources to churches in the global South. Where we lack credibility in sharing the gospel in an unreached context, we are generally welcomed by the growing church to help train and influence – provided we can gain trust.

To me, this is highly encouraging! It means that God has selected believers from their own people groups to lead the advancement of the Kingdom, and it means that we as outsiders can have a role in partnering with, training, coaching, and empowering those national leaders.

“Apostolic”

The term ‘apostolic’ can bring about a lot of different opinions and even different emotions, depending on where you land theologically. However, movement practitioners largely agree that it is national leaders with the apostolic gifting that are most commonly the ones that catalyze movements. At the very least, you’re probably looking to partner with someone that has a strong ‘APE’ gifting (Apostolic / Prophetic / Evangelistic) in order to get a new disciple-making and church planting multiplication ministry started.

We plan to do a longer post in the future about the word ‘apostolic,’ but for the purposes of understanding what to look for in a NAV, we’ll point to 4 aspects of the apostolic gifting that we’re looking for in a NAV. These are compiled from a few different resources about the apostolic gifting, as well as trying to investigate from the Word. We’ll list a few of those resources at the bottom of the post.

Vision – firstly, they have received big vision from God. At the very least, it is vision that goes beyond growing their own church. When we met Mint and asked her what her vision is, she felt called to bring the gospel to Laos and wanted to see multiplication happen throughout northeast Thailand and Laos. Another NAV that we work with in southern Thailand said, “I want to see 1 million Muslims follow Jesus in my lifetime.” That seems to fit the bill!

Faith – They have the faith to believe that God will complete this vision and use them towards that big vision. This might feel redundant, but we’ve seen plenty of people be drawn to big vision or even create big ideas, but lack the faith to believe God wants to use them in this and therefore do not pursue the vision wholeheartedly. Those with the apostolic gift will have both the vision and the faith to pursue it.

Systems and Structures – Clinton describes the function of the apostolic as “a special leadership capacity to move with authority from God to create new ministry structures and to develop and appoint leadership in these structures.” In particular, we think that those with the apostolic gifting pioneer new ministries, specifically in the context of unreached church planting and disciple making. There may be pioneers who set up new structures within the local church or in an orphanage ministry, which is great, but we believe the apostolic gift is one that is primarily used among the unreached. It reflects Paul’s apostolic passion in Romans 15:20, to go where there is no foundation. In setting up new systems and structures, the apostolic leader may for a time act as a ‘jack of all trades,’ leading out in evangelism and teaching and shepherding – whatever is needed to establish this new pioneering ministry. As the ministry moves towards maturity, it’s better and healthier for the apostolic to then release the ongoing growth of the ministry to the other leadership giftings, especially the shepherds/teachers.

Leaders – Lastly, the apostolically gifted leader is able to recruit, develop, and release leaders. They understand that leaders are critical in starting and multiplying a new ministry, and will constantly have a lens of raising up new leaders to take over responsibilities that the NAV has started or to pioneer new areas under the NAV’s leadership. Young leaders will be attracted to the NAV’s life, ministry, vision, and character, and want to follow them.

These 4 aspects are what seem to come up consistently in various writings about the apostolic gift as well as our own personal experience. But a few others things might be indicators of an apostolic leader:

• Apostolic leaders most likely won’t keep to the status quo. The vision that God has given them will result in some discontentment if the group they’re with or the current role they have isn’t pursuing that vision wholeheartedly. As a result, these apostolic leaders could stick out as a little weird or be known as a ‘black sheep’ of sorts.
• Apostolic leaders are not afraid to fail forward and start new things. One CPM practitioner told us to look for ‘failed business entrepreneurs,’ as that could be an indicator of their willingness to fail forward and pioneer that needs to be directed towards a God-given vision and ministry.
• God has clearly been moving in their lives. Whether in the story of how they came to faith, or in the ways that the Lord has been refining them to step into ministry, there is a clear pattern of the Lord’s hand on their lives that can be an indicator of Him preparing them for a significant work ahead.

“Visionary”

Lastly, at the risk of being redundant, a NAV is a visionary leader. They have the big vision and the faith to pursue it like we mentioned in the apostolic section. They’re also surrendered to God and willing to do anything – to sacrifice, to fail, to pioneer – in order to pursue that vision. As with the ‘leaders’ section of the apostolic gifting, the visionary leader is able to influence others – sometimes large numbers of people – towards a vision of multiplication.

Now that we have more clarity on the different aspects of the term National Apostolic Visionary, we’ll look at some additional characteristics of a NAV that we’re looking to partner with in pursuing movements.

Flexible Methodology

A NAV that we want to partner with will have openness to try different methodologies of church planting and disciple-making. I don’t think that CPM practitioners can have a monopoly on the apostolic gifting (although we may prefer to!); there may be apostolic leaders that you meet that God has called to pursue a different type of ministry than CPM. And that’s OK! But it may not be the right timing for you to partner with them until they’re open to try a movement methodology. If they’re locked in and committed to a different type of ministry methodology, we will continue to keep the relationship open and even vision cast towards trying something new in hopes that they might be open at a later time, but we won’t partner with them until we know they’re willing to pursue a movement approach.

Surrendered to God

Lastly, we’re looking for a NAV that we partner with to be surrendered to God. Even if a national leader has what looks like apostolic gifts and a big vision, if they have major areas of their lives that are not submitted to God or still need to grow, then they may not be ready for us to jump in fully and partner with them in catalyzing movements. This can look like major distractions with their time, like other ministries, family issues, debt, or character issues. Ultimately, if these things are not addressed in submission to God, they will end up being barriers to the national leader moving forward in the work. Or possibly even worse, some of the work will get started under their leadership and then be wiped out when these issues come back to bite them. Even Paul, after his conversion on the road to Damascus, had a significant amount of time where his convictions, character, and skills needed to be honed before he and Barnabas are ultimately set aside by the Holy Spirit to begin the first journey.

Does Paul Fit the NAV Definition?

Speaking of Paul, the whole point of the Be Barnabas approach is to find a national “Paul,” an insider who God has chosen to catalyze and lead movements where the gospel has not yet gone. So does Paul fit the NAV definition we’ve listed above?

National – The intent of the term ‘national’ has to do with the NAV being a cultural insider, able to contextualize the gospel and whatever the movement needs with fewer limits than a cultural outsider. In this sense, and in a literal sense as Paul was a Roman citizen (Acts 16:37), Paul was uniquely situated to contextualize the gospel to Jews, Greeks, and to Romans. As Paul famously notes in 1 Corinthians 9:

To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.

1 Corinthians 9:20-23

Paul is clear about his legitimacy as a Jew (Phil. 3:5-6), who was from Tarsus which was well-known as a center of Greek learning and who writes his epistles in Greek, and he also leverages his Roman citizenship to appeal to authorities on his journeys in Acts 22:26-28. We see Paul contextualize his gospel message depending on the audience, reasoning with the Jews in the synagogue in Thessalonica from the Scriptures (Acts 17:1-4), or conversing with the philosophers in Athens and in the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-34) out of his cultural understanding of these varied contexts.

Apostolic – This is very obviously a yes. More than having the apostolic gifting, Scripture makes it clear that Paul is THE Apostle to the Gentiles, as Paul calls himself that in Romans 11:13. We see in Acts and in the epistles that Paul also more than fits the other criteria.

We’ll address vision and faith under the ‘Visionary’ section below. As for systems and structures, along with leaders, we can see in Acts and the epistles the gifting Paul has to set up the early church to thrive and multiply. He raises up local leaders as well as an apostolic band of leaders, sending letters and leaders to and from different key cities to address various issues in the churches, bring encouragement and vision to the believers, and manage the first Century movement in 6 distinct cities and regions through word of mouth and written letters!

Visionary – Paul’s vision and faith to be used to reach the Gentiles and those who have never heard is the clear example of the apostolic leader that we are looking for!

For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God—so that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ; and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation.

Romans 15:18-20

Flexible Methodology – As we can see in the different strategies that Paul uses in Acts, Paul uses a variety of methodologies to reach different peoples in a pioneering context. Whether he went first to the synagogue to win near-culture Jews and God-fearing Jews to follow Christ, cast out demons and healed people through signs and wonders, or reasoned with philosophers, Paul was clearly not tied to a single method, but willing to do whatever it took to win some.

Surrendered to God – Lastly, we could pick a dozen verses to illustrate Paul’s surrender to God. But perhaps none exemplify it more than his words in Philippians 3. 

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Philippians 3:8–11

As DL Moody said, “The world has yet to see what God can do with a man fully consecrated to him.” I might propose that we have seen the result in the Apostle Paul. May we find and advocate for many more National Apostolic Visionary leaders like him!

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We realize that other CPM practitioners may or may not agree with these characteristics, or have ones that they’d like to add, and that’s great! Identifying and partnering with NAVs is definitely not an exact science, but these are the aspects that have consistently come to the top for us in reading the Word, learning from CPM literature, talking to CPM practitioners, and in our own personal experience. The term NAV, the related characteristics, and the following posts about how to filter for NAVs are simply meant to be a helpful tool for goers to begin looking for catalytic leaders that will multiply among the unreached.

In the next few posts, we’ll walk through the various stages of how a goer can begin to filter and find a NAV to partner with. We’ll introduce the NAV Scoreboard, which will help you evaluate these different aspects of a NAV in the process of filtering.

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Resources on the Apostolic Gifting:

Leadership Commentaries by Robert Clinton (has a variety of articles on the apostolic gift, process, ministry)
Loving the Church, Blessing the Nations by George Miley (Chapters 9-12)
A Vision of the Possible by Daniel Sinclair
The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century by Alan Hirsch and Tim Catchim

Up to this point, this blog has largely covered some tools and paradigms around team leadership on the field. Our next series of posts will switch gears a bit to focus more on a strategic component of pursuing movements that we think is critically important.

We’re excited to start the ‘Be Barnabas’ series. Along with union with Christ, it’s one of the key ‘pillars’ that has shaped our ministry and leadership philosophy, and one of the reasons we started this blog.

‘Be Barnabas’ is what we call the role of the outsider in finding, equipping, and empowering a national apostolic visionary who is a cultural insider to catalyze movements. It’s a pattern modeled after Barnabas, who found, vouched for, teamed with, empowered, and encouraged Paul – the apostle who catalyzed much of the movement of the early church in Acts.

Why is Be Barnabas important? There’s a lot that can be said around missiology and missions history for the changing role of the outsider or Westerner in pursuing the Great Commission among the unreached. But for us, there’s two main reasons:

1. The vast majority of movements around the world are not started by a cultural outsider directly multiplying among the unreached, but through helping a national apostolic visionary (NAV) leader to catalyze a movement.
2. The biggest untapped potential missions force in the world is the church in the Global South, where two-thirds of the world’s Christians now reside. Those that are cultural insiders or proximate to the unreached will have much fewer barriers to multiplying churches than cultural outsiders will have.

In this series, we plan to tell some stories of what Be Barnabas looks like, give some of the Scriptural and movement principles behind Being Barnabas, and lay out a clear pathway for what it looks like to find, equip, and empower a NAV once you’ve reached the field.

For this post, we wanted to introduce Mint’s story. Mint is our first national partner that we’ve been walking with now for 5 years. The following story is what I wrote for our church’s missions newsletter about 2 years back in 2021. We hope this story is encouraging and gets you excited to learn more about Being Barnabas!

“What is your vision, Mint?”

She whispered back to us, almost embarrassed at the audacity of such a goal: “I think God is saying that we need to pursue planting 100 multiplying churches.”

“I never thought that God could use me for something like this—I used to be the church secretary! I am just a little seed in God’s plans.”

My wife and I have been goers in Southeast Asia for the past seven years; Mint is one of our main national partners that we coach, serve, and encourage in the work of church planting multiplication. Through serving and empowering our national brothers and sisters in Great Commission work, we have had the privilege of seeing God moving in mighty ways among some of the spiritually darkest contexts in the world.

Before we launched, we had the traditional missions mindset: move overseas, learn the language, share the gospel, gather some believers, plant a church, and hand it off to the local believers. But on our vision trip to this country, we heard a shocking statistic: it takes two full-time goers evangelizing for one year to lead one person to Christ in our country, because of the language, cultural, and identity barriers of foreign messengers bringing a foreign message.

Of the 70 million people in our country, only 0.7% are Christian. If we wanted to see this country “filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14), the traditional missions approach would be like trying to transform the Sahara desert into a body of water, one drop at a time. Meanwhile,1,500 people a day are dying in our country and entering into an eternity separated from Christ without even a chance to hear of the hope of the gospel.

These realities drove our team to two questions:

1. How many people would have a chance to hear the gospel?
2. What is our role in seeing as many people hear the gospel as possible?

In our prayer and seeking, we learned about Church Planting Movements. These movements of God were happening throughout the unreached world, where simple churches and obedient disciples were multiplying exponentially. We learned that of the hundreds of movements started around the world, less than 1% of them were started directly through foreigners that shared the gospel and led someone to faith that multiplied. The vast majority of the movements happened through those foreigners finding, training, and coaching a national believer from that context towards multiplication. We call this role of the outsider, ‘Being Barnabas’ to a national ‘Paul’-type leader.

So when we arrived in Thailand seven years ago, our team pursued partnerships with local churches. We were looking for national leaders to come behind, like Barnabas was looking for Paul to encourage and empower towards multiplication. That’s how we met Mint.

Mint is a church planter in a rural area of our country. She is strong-willed, sassy, and she never gives up. She used to be the church secretary before she received a calling from God to plant churches. With almost no church-planting training and very little support, Mint was sent to a new province to plant a church. In her first year, Mint didn’t have a car, so she biked 20 kilometers a day trying to sell second hand clothes so that she would have enough food to eat. She said she cried almost every day at the beginning because of the many personal, financial, and ministry-related difficulties. But after 2 years of faithfully persevering and sharing the gospel hundreds of times, she finally planted her first church of about 15 people.

When we first met Mint, we asked her, “What do you hope to see happen in your ministry?” She said, “I want to see my church multiply, so that people throughout my country and the surrounding areas could hear the gospel. But I can’t get my people to obey God, much less make more disciples!” She was exhausted all the time from trying to lead the ministry by herself, and her phone was constantly ringing, with her members bringing their problems to her.

So after getting to know her and casting vision for multiplication from the Bible, we, together with Mint, started to train a small group from her church in simple tools for how to share their faith and how to disciple new believers.

In the first month, Mint and her team led seven people to faith. The next month, another eight. After three months, there were 20 new believers. They saw miracles every week—people healed through prayer, evil spirits cast out, families restored, and so many answered prayers. Keep in mind, it took Mint two years of sharing to reach 15 people. In those early months, Mint was more surprised than anyone at all that God was doing. 

Fast forward several months later, and 20 new believers multiplied into 80 new believers, and Mint planted five more house churches. At one house church training, a new believer gave us his lunch of sticky rice and ginger juice to use as the communion elements!

Soon after this, the church planting pastor from Mint’s network said, “Mint and her team have had more fruit in the last several months than all the other church planters combined. We want to train all of them in the things you’re doing with Mint!” Our team started training about 15 church planting teams in early 2019; in just one year they had led over 200 people to faith and started over 30 house churches. It would have taken my wife and me 200 years of sharing to get to the number of new believers that our national partners saw in just one year.

For us, serving and empowering Mint isn’t just about training or methodology. That’s honestly just a small part of our interaction. It’s being part of her life, being a listening ear, caring about her thriving. It is hours and hours in the car together on our way to visit new believers and train others, discussing and ranting about every possible topic together. Our favorite food to eat together on the road is KFC—which is way better in our country than in the US! When we go to visit Mint, her mom always cooks for us and calls us her own children. Mint has a deep abiding relationship with God, and she is an easy crier when she shares what she’s learning from Him.

Being Barnabas to Mint is getting to celebrate with her when there is success and fruitfulness, but also sharing in her burdens and sufferings. We walked together with Mint and mourned with her when she told us her dad decided to leave her and her mom to go live with another woman. We wept with her when she told us that two new believers decided to leave the church because of a conflict. They just left their Bibles on her doorstep and disappeared without a word. She said the hardest part was not that they rejected her, but that they were rejecting Jesus.

We can’t do what Mint does. But we can serve her, we can encourage her, and we can equip her with tools for how to multiply. We cannot directly start a movement in our country. But we can help her to do it. We were at a prayer retreat with Mint when she received this vision from God to plant 100 churches. We continue to believe that 100 churches is just the first step for what God has in store for her. Mint is currently overseeing seven church planting teams as a regional leader, and her teams are planting multiplying churches throughout the country, on their way to 100.

I have never baptized a single person in Mint’s province. Mint and her team have seen over 120 people come to faith and baptized them in the river. I have never planted a church among the people in our country, but Mint has at least 10 healthy churches who each have a goal to pioneer in new areas. When I originally thought about missions, I always imagined that I would be the one leading people to faith. But there is something so much richer and better in seeing Mint succeed—because she is a national leader, called by God, and multiplying among her own people.

In 1 Thessalonians 2, Paul writes to one of his churches, and his words perfectly reflect what we feel towards Mint. Paul tells them, “What is our hope or joy or crown of boasting before the Lord Jesus at the time of his coming? Is it not you? For you are our glory and our joy.” We love Mint so much, as a friend, a co-laborer, and a sister in Christ. Knowing and helping her is our joy and if no one ever knows our names, it doesn’t matter, because God is using Mint to multiply the gospel in our country.

“Strategy” is a frequently used word in missions leadership, maybe because of the parallels between missions and military situations. It’s often expected that team leaders would be ‘strategic’ in their ministry plans and leadership of their teams. For some leaders, they hear the word ‘strategy plan’ and they get really excited. Others might hear it and think, ‘that’s overwhelming, I’ll never be able to create a strategy and I don’t even know where to start.’ 

This is a two-part guide for how to write a Strategy Plan for your ministry. In this first part, I want to just define a few things about strategy and some of the information that needs to be gathered before you write a strategy plan. In the second part, we’ll have a step-by-step guide for how to write a Strategy Plan.

This guide is intended primarily for field team leaders pursuing movements among the unreached, but I think it can be adapted for many different ministry contexts. This was developed when we expanded from one team that Jenn and I led into 3 teams in early 2020, and we needed to help our new team leaders create their own strategy plans. I had to switch from thinking about strategy more intuitively and instead think of how any team leader, regardless of their natural aptitudes, could create a basic strategy plan for their ministry and their team.

Vision vs. Strategy vs. Tactics

The dictionary definition of strategy is – a plan of action designed to accomplish an overall goal within certain conditions. It’s important to distinguish vision (the end goal) from strategy (the plan) and tactics (the actions you do to fulfill the plan). Your vision (e.g. multiplying movements among this unreached people group) should be heavily prayed over and considered even before you launch to the field – it should very rarely change unless something very drastic happens or God speaks in a very clear way. You should be confident, clear, and committed enough to the vision God has given to you to be willing to give your life for it.

Strategy is the plan that you use to get from where you are to the vision that God has given you; it should be revisited and reworked probably 1-3 times a year to get a big picture view of how it’s going and how to plan to move forward. Tactics are the day-to-day and week-to-week actions that you do to accomplish your strategic objectives, and can change just as frequently.

What Strategy Is and Isn’t

Before we jump into the step-by-step guide, I wanted to bring some clarity to what I think strategy is and is not. Strategic thinking can quickly go from helpful tool to unhelpful pitfall if we’re not careful.

• Strategy is not primary. Even though I personally love strategy and my mind is drawn to it, I think we can assign far too much value to strategic thinking and strategy plans, particularly for Westerners. Give me a leader with godly character who is able to listen to the Holy Spirit and is humble to learn, over a strategic thinker without those things, every time. The best man-made strategies cannot compare to a godly leader obedient to the Spirit.
• Strategy is not meant to be perfect. The goal should never be to have a perfect plan. Ministry is messy because ministry involves people, including you and me! Therefore, we should hold our plans relatively loosely, and not get upset when our strategies don’t end up working out. But going through the process of thinking and planning can help you to understand what’s going well and what isn’t working, as well as other important aspects (more below). From experience, our plans have never really worked out how I originally thought it would, but we’ve seen God more often than not fulfill the goals and objectives that He was giving us. It feels like He is simultaneously reminding us that He is in charge, and showing His faithfulness to do what He leads us towards!
• Strategy is not as simple as copying someone else’s. You cannot carbon copy someone else’s strategy. This is a pitfall for a lot of people working towards CPM: they think, ‘well this strategy or training worked there, so it’s going to work here!’ The place you’re going to is unreached because of the difficult barriers to the gospel and to multiplication. Each context is unique because people groups and cultures are complex, so having a cookie-cutter approach between different contexts rarely works. It’s fine to mimic some of the things you learn from other places – most of the tools and lessons we use in Thailand are totally ripped off from other places in the world.

Strategy is not primary, won’t be perfect, and shouldn’t be copied, but it’s still a powerful tool when we have the right perspective:

• Strategy is important. Even though strategy plans won’t be perfect, it’s still an important endeavor and a helpful tool in your ministry. It’s the pathway for how you want to get to the vision God has given you, and it helps to create good expectations for your team. One of the questions we got the most from our teammates was, “Are we doing the right thing?” Crafting a strategy plan helps you and your team to move forward with focus, to thoughtfully learn from and adjust to your mistakes, and gives you clarity in what you’re asking God for in faith-filled prayer. 
• Strategy is doable. You don’t need to be an amazing ‘strategist’ in order to create a basic strategy plan. It shouldn’t be overly complicated or it will cease to be helpful. If you’re willing to learn, to listen to the Holy Spirit, and to put in some of the time and effort to write things down, a strategy plan will be a helpful tool for you and your team.
• Strategy requires continued learning and adapting. Whether a new team leader or an experienced one, you will never have all the information you need to create a perfect plan. There will always be mistakes, missteps, and places where you’re downright wrong, and a good leader will learn from failing forward. God’s ways are not our ways (Isa. 55:8-9), and that’s good! If you’ve learned from the actions you’ve taken, then you’re well on your way to figuring out what will work. And, there are others that have gone before that can help you – learn from them!

Information Gathering

Before we jump into the steps for writing a strategy plan, there’s two areas that require some learning and information gathering: principles and context.

Learn the Principles

Ministry principles are the building blocks for your ministry plan. A principle is something that is true regardless of context. Our ministry philosophy and strategic plan uses CPM principles.

As much as possible, we try to adhere to these principles and keep these in mind when we’re forming our strategy plan and tactics. When making ministry decisions, we’ll ask – is this simple and reproducible? Is this in line with Scripture? Are we sowing broadly?

For movement practitioners, it’s essential to know these principles and study the different ways these principles can be applied in different contexts. The more you can learn from others that are doing or have seen success in a similar ministry as you, the more you’ll build your database of knowledge and be able to form strategy appropriately.

Principles are different from applications – this is an important distinction in strategy. For example, broad sowing is an important principle for multiplication, but the application of broad sowing can look different in different contexts.

For us, 3 Circles is a gospel sharing tool that we learned and used in the US. In our first training group with Thai disciple-makers, we trained them in how to use 3 Circles. After 3+ months of going onto the college campus as a team and sharing 3 Circles over 200 times with almost no success, we asked our Thai partners, ‘is this a good tool for sharing in Thailand?’ They told us, ‘No, it isn’t!’ There were too many differences in worldview for 3 Circles to make sense to someone from a Buddhist background, so we needed to pick an application that was more contextually appropriate.

It can also be helpful to learn from and use different ministry models to guide your strategic planning. We use this Multiplication Cycle adapted from other models with our partners in Thailand, but there are many other models out there like 4 Fields or the T4T Three Thirds Process. There’s a ton of resources out there, and you can find some of them on our Resources page.

Investigate your Context

Now that you’ve studied and understood the ministry principles and models that you want to use – here comes the hard part! How do I apply this in my context? What are the best methods, practices, and rhythms of training, coaching, evangelism, discipleship, and church planting among your people group?

Before you launch, and as you’re there, learn as much as you can about your context and people. In the 2 years before we launched to Thailand, I had Joshua Project opened on my computer and Operation World on my desk, and I prayed through a different UPG a day in Thailand before we ever moved there. Learn about the culture, the gospel barriers, the history of Christianity in that country if there’s anything. Try to identify where the major barriers and opportunities are. Meet people from that country and ask a ton of questions about their upbringing and culture and context (ethnographic interviews can be a helpful tool to ask good questions). Try to meet other like-minded goers that have been there for a while, even better if they’re movement focused as well.

It’s difficult to create a strategy plan with the right applications when you haven’t learned the principles and the context. Again, you won’t have perfect knowledge, so ministry strategy requires experimentation and innovation. Ultimately, none of us as outsiders will have the cultural understanding that an insider will be, so partnering with national believers can be one of the most effective approaches in cross-cultural ministry – we call this ‘Being Barnabas’ and will write a future post about it!

Write your Strategy Plan!

From there, you can start to write up a strategy plan (part 2!). It’s a good practice to write a strategy plan before you even launch, but just hold that loosely because there’s so much you learn just by being on the ground there. When you get there, you want to learn as much as possible and write down what you learn. We had our team brainstorm 50 questions in 10 different categories that they’d try to ask different types of people over the first 2 years – some of the categories were about religion, culture, Church history, barriers to the gospel, spiritual environment, urban vs. rural, etc. 

It’s a good idea to revisit the strategy plan after you finish language school and before you start to jump into full-time ministry engagement, maybe 1-2 years after you’ve been there, depending on how long language learning is for you. Then probably evaluate your strategy plan once again after your first season of ministry as you’ve tried some stuff out.

Strategy is a tool that can help bring clarity, but it doesn’t determine your success. No one ever got to movement because of perfect man-made strategy; God alone determines when and if movements start. And the Holy Spirit is the driver and the guide – if you look at Paul’s journeys in Acts, you can clearly see some strategic aspects of how Paul operates – like going to synagogues before engaging Gentiles (Acts 17:2), or the way he sets up local leaders versus leaders in his apostolic team (Acts 19:22). But you should also go and count how many times his ‘plans’ get changed by the guiding and direction of the Holy Spirit (Acts 16:6), like getting the dream of the Macedonian call (Acts 16:9).

In Part 2, we’ll give you a step-by-step guide for how to write a strategy plan, but ultimately, our plans need to be given to us by the Spirit – and he will do it!