I got the letter below a while back from Dave White, who serves in Philippines.
Training for Trainers (T4T) is really working well for us. I’ve made good progress in contextualizing, am having great results in my own personal use in church planting, have trained one local church, and am now training a group of 30 pastors. These pastors are seeing astounding fruit. After three months, they have seen a 71% increase, ON THE AVERAGE, over their baseline of average worship service attendance.
These new believers are not just decisions for Christ. We don’t count all of those. We only count those who are in disciple-making groups. Some of these have also been brought into the mother churches. Most are part of new church plants. But all are in ongoing groups, and are make good progress in becoming disciples.
There are also key representatives from 12 denominations in on this group of 30 pastors. They are all veteran trainers of church planters. A few are now making plans to start Church Planting Networks (CPN), the first CPN in their denomination using T4T. All plan on doing this within the next couple months. I have very high hopes from these!
I thought of you a lot while I was sharing with these guys. Some of the things I said were right out of your mouth from the training you invited me to in Hong Kong back in 1997. Things like: “Start small but think big. Start with one high quality network. Multiplication at all levels. Develop reproducible tools,” etc. It was almost right out of your notes!
Thanks for setting me in this direction and for all of your help along the way. You have played a crucial role in the massive church multiplication we continue to see in the Philippines. I’m smiling.
Dave White