Promoting Movements to Christ within Natural Communities

Current church-planting methodology has in inadvertently tended to promote a modern Western paradigm of church formation based on Western individualism. This model, which consists of gathering together individual believers (often former strangers) into new “communities” of faith, results in what can be called “aggravate churches.” While the “aggrevate-church” model works well in highly individualistic Western cultures (e.g., the US), most of world, including most of the remaining unreached peoples, live in cultures that have strong family and community structures. In such societies, the process of forming aggregate churches tends to extract believers from their families and pre-existing networks of relationships, significantly harming these relationships. The new aggregate church of extracted believers is rarely able to either provide the community support thereby lost or to continue to spread the gospel through its members’ families, who now perceive the “church” as having stolen their relative or friend. Meanwhile, the New Testament also affirms an alternative church model, the oikos or household-based church, where families and their pre-existing relational networks become the church as the gospel spreads in their midst.