Logan Leadership

By guest blogger Dave White

Part of a week-long series

In our ministry in the Philippines we’ve changed the way we conduct our training of church planters. We used to gather planers for a four-day seminar and give them enough material to take them through the whole year-long planting process. When we came back to follow-up later we’d usually find that they had gotten through the beginning steps, and then had forgotten the training received to take them to the end of the first church plant. Many of the trainees requested that we come back for a follow-up training once per month. That request seemed inconceivable to me at the time. Our trainings were scattered all over the Philippines. How would we be able to come back to each of them once a month?

Some of you may have seen this image before. It’s the root structure of a grove of aspen trees. This has become the guiding image for the network of missional house churches I’m helping start.

The aspen grove is actually the world’s largest organism as the entire grove shares one root system beneath the surface. Above the earth’s surface, the trees each appear separate, yet each tree contains the exact same DNA as the tree next to it, all because they share the same roots.