What is the Hispanic/Latino Church Planting Movement?
David Garrison defines Church Planting Movements: Church Planting Movements are rapidly multiplying indigenous churches planting churches that sweep across a people group or population segment. ( David Garrison, Church Planting Movements, WIGtake, 2004) What are the key points of our Latino CPM? Vision: what motives us is not mere numbers, but a reflection of God’s compassionate love for all people and for every group of people. The vision is to do what it takes to reach a whole group of people through churches that plant churches.
Prayer: we can understand and organize how to raise funds for buildings, staff, programs and organization. Some of that could happen even without the Lord’s blessing. However, we can not conceive of how to establish a CPM. We know what they look like but they are not created by us. Therefore we pray. Indigenous: What we mean are churches that grow out of and are suited to their context. Suppose you think Willow Creek is the perfect church. It is marvelously successful. However, Willow Creek could not be sustained by the resources, nor even be desired by the peoples we may want to reach. We do not plop models on people, but we seek to let the people group determine the model of church. We can’t squeeze one people group into another’s model. Reproducible: If the local community can not produce leaders, become pastors, sustain the operation of the churches; those churches are alien structures that will not be reproducible. Every out of context feature is a roadblock. For example, we can normally expect churches in our contest to have fully paid pastors with seminary training, church buildings, and plenty of parking. Those expectations do not fit in places like rural China, or inner city
Milwaukee. People Group:
Wisconsin is experiencing an increase in people for whom Spanish is the first language. Our Census bureau uses the term Hispanic, but we are talking about a diverse linguistic unit. The current growth is primarily in Mexican and Southwestern US migration. This is our audience.
Pastors and Planters: A key factor in church planting movements is finding, training, supporting and encouraging church leaders from these churches. Certainly someone has to come from outside to get it started, but it has to pick up workers from inside to sustain the growth. The form of theological and ministry training will be different, but it needs to be of high quality. It may be we are working with men who have secular employment, but we need to honor them as pastors just the same.
Where are we in the FLD? We have two reproducing congregations. La Cosecha (Harvest) in
Norwalk and Nueva Vida (New Life) in Sun Prairie. La Cosecha sent their pastor to begin Nueva Vida. They have had a Bible study among migrant workers in Merrilan. Nueva Vida is working towards a church plant in Waterloo. We have two full time Latino Pastors. Adrian Rayo (Nueva Vida) who lives in Sun Prairie.
Rubens Silva has recently moved to the FLD to be a church planter near Plover/Stevens Point. There are two Hispanic Church Planting Steering Committees, one in the Madison area, and one in central Wisconsin.
We have a Training Center restarting in Madison. We have identified several lay leaders who are already involved in church ministry, who are interested in ministry training. A new Training Center Plan is being developed, utilizing the distance education program of
The University of the Americas.Vision? A number of churches have become aware of Spanish speaking neighbors and are wondering if they might somehow host a church plant in their community. How can Your Church Help? Pray – we would love to include you in regular prayer updates. ->Contact us or follow information at this Blog. Invite – invite Adrian, Raul or Rubens to visit your congregation for a bit of vision casting.
Adrian Rayo - arayo111@yahoo.com
Rubens Silva – rubenscampos@yahoo.com
Look – are you in one of those communities ripe for a Latino church plant? Be Visionary – you do not have to be a large church to be a partner.
Honor – show the same regard to our brothers in ministry as you would fellow Anglo Pastors or missionaries. Support – There are many options for support. Each of the pastors could use additional support. We would welcome gifts toward the tuition, supplies, books and materials needed for the Youth – Perhaps your youth ministry can help with an in-state mission trip.
