I got to spend a couple of hours with a church planter today from Sri Lanka. Because of the political and religious climate of the country, he asked that we not publish his name, church name or any pictures. But it was a fascinating and inspiring time and I wanted to share a few things I picked up from my time with him.

First, a little background on the church and cultural climate of the country:

• Sri Lanka has about 21 million people.
• About 2% of the people are protestant Christian. The majority are Buddhist, followed by Hindu, Muslim and then non-practicing Catholics.
• Just three years ago, a Civil War ended that raged through the country for over 30 years.
• In the last few years, more than 100 pastors have been killed, 300 churches have been burned down and this particular pastor regularly receives death threats (hence the anonymity of this post).
• This church was planted 11 years ago with 12 people. Today there are 1700 people in the church (which has a scattered and gathered approach), they’ve planted 7 networked campuses, 12 independent churches and are looking at planting 3-4 just this year.

So there’s a little background.

Here are some things I noticed that really stood out to me from this conversation:

• This pastor and his team approached leadership, church planting and ministry very simply: “We read through the Gospels and the book of Acts and asked, “OK, How should we plant a church?”
• It was amazing to see how similar they were in practice to what 3DM does in training leaders. In a really really positive way.
• This is how they plant churches: Often families were driving quite a ways to get to their church. If they were committed enough and had been through some training, they would send one of their core leaders from the missional center out to this family and they’d start plowing the missional soil together. Then, they send in an insanely gifted evangelist who would only stay for 6 months and reap a harvest of of families coming into the Kingdom. So, in real life, the church they are about to plant is one where they sent a gifted evangelist for 6 months and he’s coming back to this missional center now, but this burgeoning church plant that started with a core leader and one family now has FIFTEEN families that have come to faith in Jesus. And that’s how the church started. Doesn’t that sound eerily similar to how Paul did things?
• They have figured out how to “staff up” in terms of full-time pastors who train the members of the church. So they have a pretty large staff that trains the congregation, but here’s why: “The harvest is plentiful and we won’t want to not have enough workers.”
• Every leader is held accountable through a G12 leadership group. You’ve probably heard of G12 before, which saw quite a lot of success in South America. They have taken a lot of the ideas and tweaked them and are seeing explosive growth. He believes all of their missional growth is based on discipling people well. Again, sounded very much like what I’d call a Huddle.
• They have just started House Churches of 20-50 people who meet on Sunday nights that seek to reach out to their neighbors who don’t go to church. This is their principle to those in the community: “You can come here on a Sunday morning for a church service, but that means you have to help start one of your own for people who won’t come here.” And yet again…it sounds strangely familiar to this thing we call Missional Communities.

Maybe…just maybe…it isn’t a fad or a way of doing church that will pass but a way that the church has been living out for thousands of years that we see pretty clearly on the pages of scripture?