Why Church Planting?

2006-11-18

In 2006, I began training to be a church planter. It has been several years since I heard about the great need for people to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to remote tribal locations. Isolated throughout the world, there are thousands of people groups that have no Gospel witness: no one who knows their language and culture to be able to tell them about Jesus, no church, and no Bible in their language. Without Christ, great numbers of these remote people die daily without hope, going to hell for eternity. These are people that the Lord died for, just like me.

For a long time, I wrestled with becoming a tribal church planter, thinking that perhaps I was not up for the task. The reality, however, is that this task is impossible for anybody. This is a God-sized task. God wants to use fallible human beings to carry out His task of reaching the nations, just as He has from the beginning.

The West has such a great witness for the Gospel. Many great servants of the Lord serve in these places, and this is an awesome thing. The need is far greater, however, in these remote locations. Thousands of languages exist without any portion of the Bible translated. Some statistics say there are as many 600 evangelical churches for every language group without the Gospel. Yet we can go down to the street to any number of churches that we can choose from, and we have had the Bible in our language for hundreds of years.

We cannot overlook the immensity of this task. We cannot overlook the reality of the lost condition of tribal people. Tribal cultures are often extremely animistic; these people believe that the spirit world controls all aspects of life and the people must placate them through various rituals or manipulate them to get what they want. They are enslaved by Satan and they have no escape, neither in this life or in eternity, without the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

“For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!” (Romans 10:13-15).