by Dave Coles
In one of the hardest places on earth to plant churches—a region once called the ‘graveyard of missions’—something extraordinary happened. When Victor John heard about a new approach to planting churches in unreached communities, he wanted to know more. Although missionaries had been working in his part of northern India for 200 years, they had seen little fruit among the unreached. His 15-year ministry as a pastor in Uttar Pradesh had also failed to significantly impact the unreached majority around him.
John’s step to implement a new ministry approach did not lead to quick success. ‘I had some very depressing years at the beginning of this work,’ John recalled. ‘I lost all my friends and not much was happening in the ministry . . . Many people thought what I was doing was crazy.’
A Breakthrough in the ‘Graveyard of Missions’
However, God blessed a creative focus on obedience-oriented discipleship, utilizing the Bhojpuri language in ways suitable for oral learners. This culminated in the release of the first edition of the Bhojpuri New Testament in 1998. By the year 2000, a team of top researchers from the Southern Baptist International Mission Board (IMB) confirmed that over 224,000 Bhojpuri-speaking Hindus had come to Christ and were worshiping in more than 3,277 new churches.
This new church planting method led to a ministry breakthrough—now known as a Church Planting Movement (CPM). A CPM is defined as at least four generations of indigenous churches planting new churches in multiple streams, with each stream reproducing churches.
For most of the past 2,000 years, the gospel has made little progress among peoples professing other major religions such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Even the great missionary advances of the 18th and 19th centuries primarily reached tribal peoples, leaving followers of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism almost entirely untouched by the gospel.
In our world today, CPMs play a vital role, as one of the few ministry approaches in which kingdom growth regularly exceeds population growth, while also transforming societies from within. The vast majority of movements to Christ in recent decades are occurring among religious groups previously closed to the good news of Christ.
Criticism versus Evidence from the Field
Yet, this method of presenting the gospel, forming new churches, and discipling new believers still faces resistance. Critics of this church planting approach, such as Brooks Buser of Radius International, have raised questions of false conversions and the authenticity of believers’ claims that they are ‘born again’.
However, a growing body of research corroborates the validity of CPM reports. In 2021, the global anthology Motus Dei: The Movement of God to Disciple the Nations attested to the existence of movements in many corners of the world. A new book by David Garrison called Inside Church Planting Movements (WIGTake Resources, 2025) examines twenty-eight movements assessed by the Baptist International Mission Board, and documents movements from Asia to Africa, the Middle East to the Americas.
CPMs have proven better able to survive and flourish in the context of the majority non-Christian settings of unreached groups. They have been documented in South Asia, Southeast Asia,West Africa, and East Africa. Over 2,000 such movements have been reported in various parts of the world, totalling over 100 million disciples.
Disciples within a CPM generally prefer to worship in houses or other multi-use locations rather than building church buildings. Most congregations are led by bi-vocational pastors rather than salaried pastors. And they focus on all believers actively studying and applying God’s word, rather than on adopting funded programs to nurture spiritual life and growth. They aim to reach families and groups, rather than just individuals. And they are indigenously led from the start, with these factors resulting in rapid reproduction—even in challenging and previously-unreached contexts.
Large numbers of people coming to faith from among unreached peoples can seem too good to be true. First, most of us have never seen or experienced anything like what God is doing in these movements. Second, most of these movements are happening in locations where the presence of outsiders (especially Westerners) immediately raises suspicion and often sparks major problems for local believers. This limits options for on-site assessment. Third, in some cases, ministry reports have been exaggerated for fundraising purposes.
Questions about credibility in the reporting of numbers have been answered in great depth from a number of angles. Although not every reported movement has been verified by an objective outside party, mission researcher Justin Long has shown that ‘All movements, in some way or another and with some regularity, attempt a count of their membership for a variety of reasons. They use methods similar to Western denominations, with similar levels of accuracy.’
Concerning rapid reproduction, those involved in movements see presenting rapid kingdom growth not as a goal in itself but as a result of God’s powerful work. When rapid growth includes spiritual health (see below) Scripture consistently portrays it positively, as a cause for rejoicing.
The Question of Sound Doctrine
Other concerns often include questions about the doctrinal and ecclesiological soundness of the teaching and churches in movements, for example, the definition of ‘church’.
Matt Rhodes, describing a hypothetical missionary who might report exciting statistics, opines, ‘What he’s actually produced may be . . . a circus of heresies where a generation of people are now inoculated against the real gospel because they were fooled by a substitute.’
Questions about the doctrinal soundness of the teaching and churches in movements have been answered at length in the chapter ‘Addressing Theological and Missiological Objections to CPM/DMM’. One accusation, for example, is that ‘CPMs leave open a door for false teaching because of inadequate theological training for leaders.’ This, however, founders on false assumptions. In fact, most CPMs do have a role for teaching by spiritually mature teachers. This teaching tends to be organically connected, as we see in the New Testament, rather than depending on formal education that removes potential leaders from their ministry context. The criticism also seems to follow the false notion that higher education prevents false teaching. CPMs, on the other hand, employ corporate Bible study and mutual accountability with global connectedness as means to stay faithful to God’s word.
Another fear is that, ‘CPMs have inadequate ecclesiology’ (their ‘churches’ may not be real churches). In most cases this reflects either a lack of information about actual CPMs or criteria for ‘church’ heavily dependent on Western ecclesiastical traditions.
Some critics also worry that, ‘Obedience-based discipleship runs the risk of bypassing grace and teaching legalism,’ misunderstanding both the intent and practice of obedience-based discipleship, and overlooking the process God used throughout the Old Covenant—of calling for obedience before giving a clear revelation of salvation through Christ.
Discipleship in Practice
Concerns about the quality of discipleship within movements ironically turn the tables on questioners. The vast majority of disciples in these movements actively engage in personal Bible study with clear application of the Scripture and regular testimony describing the results of their obedience to Scripture. They also regularly share with others their faith and the truths they are learning from Scripture. And they have vision and intentional lifestyle patterns for helping others become disciples of Jesus. These biblically rooted patterns appear more consistently in movements than in most churches attended or led by those questioning the movements.
Churches arising from CPMs include elements of each local culture—such as music, liturgy, room size, and seating patterns. In some places, disciples may gather to worship under a large tree. In others, they may sit in a circle facing each other. Both the language and style of music is indigenous. Yet, they share with the global body of Christ the essentials of salvation by grace through faith in Christ, and the Bible as their foundation for faith and practice.
A Call to Gratitude and Humility
It’s time for the body of Christ to move away from skepticism of such gospel-sharing methods and give thanks for the salvation of previously unreached peoples. We can celebrate creative ideas from CPMs on following Jesus: abundant prayer and fasting, contextually sensitive and abundant evangelism, aiming to reach groups rather than just individuals, and equipping disciples to actively reproduce disciples.
The question is no longer whether CPMs work—but whether we have the humility to learn from them. In missions, the Spirit of God is breathing new life.
About the author: Dave Coles is an encourager and resourcer of church-planting movements among unreached groups, serving with Beyond. He has dozens of articles published about church-planting movements, contextualization, reaching Muslims, and the nature of the church. He is author of Jonathan Edwards on Movements, coauthor of Bhojpuri Breakthrough: A Movement that Keeps Multiplying, coeditor of 24:14 – A Testimony to All Peoples, and associate editor of Motus Dei: The Movement of God to Disciple the Nations.
TThis article was first published by lausanne.org and is used here with permission.
