This week’s blog series is by Dave White, a missionary with OC International in The Philippines. He shares his experience using T4T. T4T is a set of principles that weaves together evangelism, evangelism training, discipleship, and leadership development, including development of new pastors for new churches. This is all done in the context of actual church planting and church multiplication.
I mentioned yesterday that I attended a training event on how to use the story method to make disciples. It worked well … for me … but I found it was too difficult for brand new believers to reproduce. The process we were taught involved choosing a story, memorizing the story, looking for “treasures” in the story, then designing questions to use to lead to the discovery of these “treasures.” That worked well with me as a leader, but it was way too much to expect from brand new believers.
Keep it simple enough so that new believers can immediately share with their friends and family. The success of what Ying Kai did was predicated on immediately mobilizing brand new believers to become outreach Bible study leaders, who could then invite their friends and family and acquaintances to learn the stories of Jesus. He continued this process for multiple generations. That was the basic method and the secret of his success. So I thought, “Let’s give it a try.”
And sure enough, I found that if you simplify the process enough, anyone can do it.