Principles For Indigenous Church Movements

In pursuing our vision of an Indigenous Biblical Church Movement in each of the target people groups of the Mekong Field, evangelizing their own people and reaching out in mission to other peoples, we recognize the following important principles:

Prayer that is passionate and focused on unreached peoples
• Abundant sowing of the gospel
• Scriptural authority as central for missionaries, new believers, and new churches
• Missionary as catalyst, mentor, and trainer, who is empowering nationals, rather than the missionary as planter, pastor, and teacher, who is leading nationals. This requires humility.
• The focus on developing a movement, not just individual churches, and therefore focusing on reproducibility rather than short-term goals
• Mobilizing all of God’s people for evangelism, discipleship, church-planting, and church-leadership
• Stating and maintaining a clear vision
• Asking, “What needs to be done?” rather than, “What can we / I do?”
• Having clear ‘Exit’ strategies – Model-Assist-Watch-Leave

Challenges

We also recognize that the challenges of putting this into practice will include:

• Developing full-orbed Biblical churches while encouraging a movement, and developing movements into mature national churches
• Sharing and developing the vision with Church and ministry partners
• Developing suitable partnerships with others in the body of Christ
• Deciding how to pursue the vision while acting with respect towards existing national churches in light of our commitments to them
• Being obedient to the great commandment as well as the great commission
• Ensuring that everything we do is based on biblical principles
• Keeping the focus on progress toward our vision, rather than on our activity
• Focusing on the principles, and not turning this into a pre-packaged methodology
• Maintaining a sense of urgency without pursuing rapidity at the expense of quality
• Maintaining an attitude of expectant humility; our confidence is in God’s ability, not our methods.