 All right. Welcome back. Welcome to our class this morning. Let's begin with the time of prayer and then we'll get into our classes. Father, we thank you for this time. We thank you Lord for giving us this opportunity once again to study and learn practical insights on church planting and how Lord you have called each one of us to build your kingdom and even as we plan and prepare and learn a God, we pray God that you will speak to us, you will give us new ideas, strategies Lord, burden us, Lord, plans, the things of God that we will Lord fulfill through your strength, through your power working in and through us Lord. We thank you for what is ahead and we just pray God that even as we study this our Lord that you will minister and you will speak to us for God. Amen our hearts and we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. All right. So last class we started with chapter 14. We began with looking at the stages of growth. We looked at how just like the natural body goes through stages of growth the church also goes through stages of growth. So we did the first one which was a pioneering stage. Then we looked at administrative organizational and structural stage meaning there's a time when as a church grows you need to get administrative, you know, get the administration of the church. You got to organize things, got to have a structure and I also shared a couple of, you know, strategies and structure that we follow here at APC. Now again, those are all come over time, right? We learned it, we learned, okay, this is how, you know, we can be more effective. So the best part is maybe if we are starting a ministry you can start off with having these structures in place. You know, sometimes we may feel, hey man, we are a small church we don't need to be so organized or so we can just get things done. But remember that you're setting the foundation. So as the church grows, you see many more people joining and you already have set things in place. So we looked at that and then we looked at the pastoral team stage team ministry and senior pastor. So as the church grows, the new leaders are raised up and eventually those leaders can become pastors in the church and then the pastors have team ministries and then the senior pastor goes into a place of overseeing, right? Overseeing and the function, the overall direction of the church. So the senior pastor is no longer, you know, involved in every small detail, right? Now, because as the church grows, you have leaders who are taking care of it like pastoral team leaders. But he's overseeing, he or she as a pioneer or the senior pastor's overseeing, developing leaders, giving, you know, very important was to trust your leaders to have them be faithful. And when we trust them, they will automatically be faithful in what they're doing. And today we'll get into the fourth point, which is the equipping, building and the trainer stage, right? Now, over time, what's happened is the church has been growing. Now, after you have all of this in place, you have a pastoral team, you have team leaders and team ministries, then you have the senior pastor who is overseeing all of this. Then comes a phase where as a church, you will look at equipping others. So it's no longer only within the church, right? It's not that, okay, I need to make sure that my church is doing well. I need to make sure that we are growing spiritually, growing in numbers. It is no longer just the leaders doing the ministry or the pastors doing the ministry, but everyone is involved. So one of the, something that we always believe in at APC is that every believer is a minister. So we all have gifts and talents, God has placed in us. We all can serve some way or the other. We believe that every one of us can minister, right? And then there's this emphasis on supernatural ministry, right? Moving everyone into a place of science, wonders and miracles. Now, this is an important phase because in the initial days, as a church, if you are beginning to, you know, talk about the gifts of the spirit, now we must understand that there are different kinds of people who will come into church. Some of them will be people who are just new to the faith. Some of them may be way matured in the faith. Some of them are still learning, growing, have a lot of questions. So different levels, of maturity they are in. So, emphasize, something that we can do is emphasize supernatural ministry, right? Talk about supernatural ministry. Talk about how God is a God who heals. God is a God who does miracles. He wants to release prophetic. He wants to, you know, release the gifts of the spirit within the church. And every believer has the gifts of the Holy Spirit. And we can flow in these gifts. What are we doing? We are emphasizing that the supernatural ministry is there within the church. So it's not like only in the book of Acts there are healings and after that there's no healings. No. We are emphasizing. We are encouraging people to step into the supernatural. Now, even as we do this, it's very important as we do this. Now, even as we do this, it's very important as teachers and as pastors and leaders that we set guidelines, be there to, you know, probably give them set guidelines on how to minister to people. Right? So we can, we can have good motives. Right? Hey, I want to learn the prophetic, but also how a prophetic word is released or how a word of knowledge is released. And if God is leading you towards praying for healing, how do you pray for it? And things like that, just the practical aspects, but emphasize the supernatural ministry, emphasize that everyone can flow in that. Right? So then the senior pastor focuses on equipping and imparting and then comes in the pastoral care. Now, when you talk about pastoral care, there's so much, right? That is, that's caring for the members. And so something that we have at ABC is we have a separate member care team. And so pastoral care could include, you know, just going for house visits, hospital visits. Right? And over time, as your church grows, you know, you'll have hundreds of people. Now, it is obvious that a pastoral team of five or six people cannot do all the house visits, hospital visits, because they also have other tasks to do. So what you can, what we have at ABC is we have something called as a member care team. So the member care team, they call up our members, talk to them. Many times members don't want to share what they're going through in life because they feel, hey, pastors are already busy. I don't want to burden them with something more. Or, you know, hey, I wanted somebody to visit home, but, you know, I know that pastors are busy. So sometimes they may hesitate. But when you have a member care team, they're willing, they're there for, you know, house visits, hospital visits, also for funeral services. You know, there are so many other things that need to be prepared for funeral services and all many other things, right? Within the church, just caring for the members. And so we have this in place as well. And then the church begins to penetrate the community and catch the vision of being a missional church, right? So one thing, one of the aspects that we try to do at ABC is we are doing it right now, is that we try to penetrate every sphere of influence, every community. And as we do that, we also have missions, right? So as teams, what we do is we, you know, we have people all across our nation. So we have two to three days conferences. Now these conferences could be a pastors conference. It could be a youth conference. It could be a leaders conference. Then we also have times when it is, you know, conferences on leadership and how to be a good leader. So all of these, you know, missions, works are there. And most of the time, what we do is we send our church folks, mature church believers who go, they don't have a, they may not be pastors. They may not be teachers of the word, but they're mature and Christ. And they are able to go out and, you know, go out on missions. So what happens is believers are ministering to one another and they're ministering to people around the world. So it's no longer, okay, I'm in the corporate. I will only be in the corporate and I'll come on Sunday, serve and go. No. Right. It's more of, hey, I'm in the corporate, in the corporate sector. I am a minister of God. I am called to be a minister. On Sunday, I am there to serve volunteer. And apart from that, God is also calling me to reach out to minister to people around me. So we move the church from this place of only being recipients to a place of giving. Right. To a place of ministering. Right. Now, again, as pastors and leaders, we must be able to identify, right, good leaders. Right. So for example, if you're, if you want to start a life group, right, we cannot just choose anyone. Right. We need to make sure because the life group leader is going to be ministering to about 10 people within the church. So what he or she says is very important. Right. So we need to train them. We need to understand like, okay, this person, okay, he or she has caught the vision of the church, has been regular to church, understands the theology of the church, the doctrines of the church, understands how the church moves. Right. So because the dangers are if, for example, right, somebody comes into church and, you know, they say, hey, you look like you can be a good leader. We appoint them and then later we realize, you know, appoint them as a life group leader and they administering to people and later we realize, hey, he does not believe in the supernatural. What happens? It becomes a problem. Right. So it's very important to know the person to, especially when they're coming into a place of leadership. Then once we know them, we know the doctrine, we know what they believe in, we know their works, we release them to begin to minister to people. Right. And you will find people that way, right. They who are learning or growing, there'll be two years, three years in the church and eventually we can give them opportunities. Right. And then the fifth stage, I just want to apologize for the sound because there's some, you know, construction that's happening. So the sound is disturbing. I apologize for that. So, but please let me know if my voice is all right, if I'm audible enough, right. Yeah. Okay. So let's go to the fifth point. Now from the equipping stage, we are equipping people within the church to go out, to train, to lead others. Then comes the apostolic mindset. And this is again a phase of, you know, just going about doing bigger things. So it's no longer, I am a pastor of this church. You may be a pastor of this church, but the moment you get into this apostolic function, it, the mindset changes, right. Now it's not like you're saying, okay, I don't want anything to do with the home church. No. But your priorities have changed. Remember the pioneering stage? In the pioneering stage, you're thinking about your church, right. The administrative stage, organizational stage, you're thinking about your church, right. I need to get things right within the church. Pastoral stage, you're looking at the next generation or the leaders that are required. Equipping stage, you're looking at, okay, everyone in the church should come to a place of reaching out to people. But now it's not only the church inside, right. It's not about only equipping people within the church, but rather than the focus being internal, the focus is now being more external. All this while, the first four points were 85 to 90 percent internal. Now, when you get into the apostolic stage, 80 to 90 percent is external. 10 percent is internal. Why? Because you've established a good framework here. So as a senior pastor, as a leader of the ministry, you can begin to freely move out, go to places, gain new territory, get, you know, start new programs. Now, for example, we're a senior pastor and somebody calls you and says, hey, why don't you come to this city, a different city, or a different nation, and you come minister to us. Now, you feel it's a good opportunity. Now, imagine it's 10 years you have your church and you're still worried, oh, if I come, who will preach on Sunday? That means what stage three has not been established properly, right? Because we need to have people on board, on the team who can take up responsibilities, right? It should never be that 10 years after a church that you are the only person who are preaching. It should never be that way. There should be other leaders. So now in the apostolic function, the senior pastor has people. So even if his presence is not there for a limited period of time, it's all right. Everything will go on. The wheels are in motion. Why? So for example, the senior pastor says, I am going for a month. Now, I've been, you know, doing a couple of events in a different nation. Now, we don't have to panic. Why? There's a conference coming up. OK, we have the teams. We have the administrative team. We have the organization. We have the structure. Everything is set in place. Just follow the structure. Everything will be done perfectly, right? So the apostolic states, the church begins to actively reproduce itself in regions beyond, meaning in different places. New churches are planted different, not only in the city, but in different parts of the city, different states, different nations. The church begins to minister, right? Believers have an apostolic mindset, meaning they're willing to sacrifice, go to new places, build God's kingdom, speak into people's lives, minister to people, right? And something that we have is I'm sure many of you have heard of it all these years. We had the short-term Bible college. We had, again, missions that we would go to. And it was wonderful to see, you know, even in the short-term Bible college, we had our church members going and teaching, right? When I say they would go, life group leaders, a few of them, they would go teach and come. So it's not always, oh, the pastors are coming to teach now. And so why are we doing that? So that we understand that, hey, as a church, we're a apostolic in nature. We want to go, gain ground. Imagine five people in the pastoral team, example, right? Five of them are doing all the missions. Now, how will the church function? We cannot, we need others to go. We need others to take up responsibilities. So the local church, that is your pioneering, point number one, your pioneering base, your starting church, the local church has become the missions base rather than a spiritual nursery, meaning more than just, you know, looking after people, you know, caring for them, and which is all important, right? I'm not saying that's not important, right? The church is always priority, you know, as pastors. The church is everything to them. They, their heart, their life is for the church, right? But rather than just being a place of, you know, just providing spiritual growth and all of that, which is important, it becomes a place of, becomes a missions base where we send out people to different cities, different nations, and they go and start a work of for God, right? So no more is it just looking after, hey, again, even as all this is happening, the other things are still going on. The wheels are in motion, right? Sunday services are going on, FTV is coming, people get connected to the church, people get connected to volunteer teams, life groups, all of that is happening. But as a senior pastor and as leaders, you're saying, hey, we are becoming a missional church, an apostolic church. We're going to raise up leaders, send them out. They will go start new churches, plant new churches, start new ministries, gain new ground. And then what the best part is, they have seen what we do in the local church, right? They have seen how they function. They have seen what works, what does not work. So they're able to replicate this in other places, right? And eventually we want to become self-sustaining, meaning establish ongoing discipleship, equipping of believers, leadership development, raising up of new leaders, all of this, and then become financially stable. So all of this will happen, right? But here's the thing. We cannot be in a hurry. We need to go along with God, go along with what he is doing, understand how he's working, make the right decisions at the right time, learn from your mistakes, trust in God, have faith in him. God will definitely do this, right? Because his promise is, you know, he says, I will build my church. The gates of hell shall not prevail against it. So he will build. All he's asking is for us to put our hands to work. Right? So these are the five stages, growth and consolidation. And, you know, these are certain areas that if you are planning to start a church, pioneering a church, just go over it. Think about it. Think about, see, the way we do the administration or the organization, the structure is in one way. So you can choose what works for you in your setting and, you know, how you feel that, you know, the leadership should be. You can do what works for you, right? And then you can also make changes. If you feel that it's not working, make changes, right? Say, okay, should we do it this way rather than this way? So again, we ask God for wisdom to do that. But then it's important to have these set in place. And eventually we will see growth. We will see consolidation that is strengthening what we already have. Right? Any questions, any thoughts you'd like to share? I know we always, only one talking. Everyone are so quiet. Any thoughts? And if you have been involved in church planting work, like maybe with your pastors or part of a core team starting church, any one of you would like to share? Nobody. Nobody's been part of a, or even if it's not a new church, but at least maybe a new ministry within the church. Or what are things that, in terms of organization, administration, what are things that you learned or you see in your church? Would you like to share that? It would be a good learning. Administratively. If you'd like to share, you can share. Nobody? Okay. I know that Rosalind serves in the church. I'm not sure at what capacity. Rosalind, Zellie also, right? You also serve in the church. Okay. All right. Go ahead, Zellie. Yeah. I was an APC team, but before APC, before I joined APC ministry, way back in 2011, I was a part of ministry, church ministry in Cojima. Where after my Bible school, you know, like three of my friends and our mentor, we started a church, and it was such a great experience and great learning experience for me because I had no much such experience at the time. I was a freshly graduated from the Bible school, but by faith, we started the ministry. It was for, I think around six months, there was intense prayer session. We used to pray and we used to go around the locality, praying around that locality, claiming the lost souls and all those things. And yeah. And now I'm not a part of that ministry, but I see growth in that ministry and my mentor there, he's doing a great job. Yeah. Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing, Zellie. Yes. Anyone else would like to share? All right. All right, no worries. So let's get into the next chapter. He'll be to stop me at any time if you want to share any thoughts or questions. Chapter 15, we'll talk about multiplication and branching out, right? So multiplication and branching is self-explanatory, right? Just multiplying. We see that in the book of Acts, there were churches, they multiplied and it just kept growing. Many churches were planted and many people were equipped. So one of the things that we can do, once you're, again, we've talked about this, right? You've planted the local church, you've pioneered the church one or two years down the line or even five years, right? The timeframe is something that we can choose, right? But one or maybe one to five years down the line, plant additional churches within the city, right? Now, even as you do that, how do you go about doing it? One, envision the church, share the vision with the church, right? So the thing is, sometimes we have the vision in our heart, but we need to share it with them. Share it with the church, right? So I remember in Mangalore, we were about 55 to 60 people in the church and we had a whole group of... No, Mangalore is a place where people would come from different cities to study. And so we had a whole group of Northeast community. So there were about 20 of them. Now, they would come to church, but they were not very regular, right? So I used to talk to them. I used to ask them what happened, why is it... So they give valid reasons. They said, see, Sunday is the day... the only day where they get to rest because Monday to Saturday, they have hectic schedule, studying the whole day. Sunday is the only day they get to rest. And two is, since it's a Sunday, the transport road or the vehicle transport facilities are lesser. So they have to travel about 12 kilometers only to get to church, right? And our church service starts at 10 o'clock, 10.30. So they said, these are the challenges that we face. So what happened was I spoke to them and I said, how about, since you want to rest on Sundays and the distance is too far, how about we start an evening church service near your area, near your colleges. So all 20 of you can come, right? So I checked with them. It's evening, okay. They all were very happy. They said, yes, evening is perfect because we get up late and it's understandable. They are young guys, right? Young people, early 18, 19, 20 years old. So I said, okay, it's fine. You can rest on Sunday, take your time, get good rest, do whatever work you have. Evening service and it's just five minutes away from your hostel. So do you think this will work? They said, yes, it will be perfect. We all will come and there are many students over here. We can invite them also and I'm sure they'll come. So what happened was I said, okay, give me three months. So I said to them, one of the regular students, I said, give me three months. So what we did was, what I did was I called the church together and I said, okay, this is what the vision is now. We want to start another location. Now, we didn't want to start just because, okay, we have nothing to do. That was not the point. So I shared that. We shared that, hey, this is where it is. The students are staying far away. These are the challenges. That's why they aren't able to come. So let us keep this in prayer. Three months we'll pray and we'll also ask God to open the right door for us. So we kept it in prayer. We prayed as a church. And then one church member, I remember very clearly, I was in Bangalore attending a conference. So I had come from Mangalore to Bangalore to another. And I was attending a conference and I got a call from our church member who was there in Mangalore and he said, I found the perfect place for church. And I've also spoken to the owner. And the owner was very good, very kind. He said, we can go ahead. He's ready to give us the space. And it's exactly opposite the college. It'll take the students two minutes to get there. And it can seat about 100 people inside. Now, I didn't go searching. I didn't do anything. They went and then they did everything. These are all church members because the vision was already shared with them. So they went. They saw the place. They got the appointment with the owner. I went with them. We spoke. We got the permissions here from Bangalore. Permissions were granted. We got the space. The church themselves came forward and said, you know what? I want to give for the chairs. I want to give for the stage. I want to give for the music for the speaker. Everyone contributed something. Now we never asked them what happened. They themselves came forward. Why did that happen? Because they caught the vision. Oh, they are ministering to students. So students are important. They are the next generation. So after three months, we started the church. And when we started, we did the same thing what we do in the main church. Same thing. Same service. Same sermon. Everything is the same. The first Sunday, we had so many people who came. If I'm not wrong, we were somewhere around 35 people. First Sunday of the launch of the church. 35 more people came. And over time, the church began to grow. Unfortunately, what happened was the lockdown came. And so many of the students went back home. It was early 2020. And then many of the students went back home. And when they went back home, we had to close it down because there was no church services at all. So we went back to going online. But all of these students were able to minister to all of the students. Remember the work that is done. And even now we have a church plant there. So envision, share the vision with them. Send out church planting teams. Now here's the thing. For new church plants, churches function independently or they can function as one church, many congregations. And then you have churches as satellite churches, live stream, and then you have campus pastors. Now let me explain this to you. First one, churches functioning independently. Now you can have a church. So I'll just share from what we do at APC. So we have churches all across India. So the churches in North India, different states, they don't follow the same pattern that we do here because many of them are in towns and villages. So they function independently. So for example, whenever they'd like, they do youth meeting, men's ministry, women's conference. Whenever they feel they are independent, but they're part of APC. Whatever they plan, they plan, they do it. Then you have churches which functions as one church. That is what's happening in Bangalore. North, south, east, west, central. We all function as one church. It is the same sermon. It is the same pattern. It is the same order of service at all locations. So if you go and sit in any of our Bangalore locations, not south, east, west or central, it is the same. Plus the worship songs may be different. The worship leaders choose different songs, but it is the same sermon. It is the same PPT. It is the same order of service. So we serve as one. So for example, we have a men's conference or a women's conference. What happens? Emailers go out to all of them. North, south, east, west, central. We have a CHMS. We have a tour. We choose mail and age group. Click on it. We get all the men. This age group 30 to 60. And then we send them in email. So it's not like, okay, men's conference is only for central and for north and south, it's another day. No, we function as one church. All of us. So we always leave this option open. A person can move from central to another location or from another location to central. It's not like, hey, why did you go there? No, we're all one church. So whether they go to central, whether they go to north, south, they're part of the church, one church. Many congregations. Then you have the satellite church. Now the satellite church is nowadays is, and this is already happening in the west and it's slowly coming in. And I'm sure in a couple of years, we will have it here in our nation as well is most of the times what happens is if there's a church, you have a campus pastor, right? So what happens is the worship happens there. Locally. And then when the sermon time comes, the sermon is broadcasted from the main church. So the main senior pastor is preaching and everyone in this church are watching the sermon live probably on the projector, LED screen, whatever. But you have a campus pastor to look after the needs of the people, right? Now the Lord's table and all of it may be done locally itself. Worship, you'll have worship teams, everything is done locally. But when it comes to the sermon, now this is just an example. There are churches which have, you know, people, even the pastors are preaching in the campus church as well. But most of these live stream satellite churches work this way. Now it's not very, it's not a growing thing in right now in our nation. It's not, maybe a couple of churches have prayed it, but we know that it can happen soon. We can do it. It's an avenue that we can, God will definitely open for us. So we can be in, for example, we can be in Bangalore and the Sunday sermon is being preached live and we can have somebody in maybe France sitting. We can have an APC campus group in France sitting in a college, maybe 50 of them sitting there and they are washing it together as a community. That becomes a satellite church, right? Now, again, the functions within that church may differ. They may have different kinds of events, youth meeting, men's ministry, women's ministry, children's ministry, all of that will be happening. But for the Sunday service, it works that way. And multiplication also includes planting new churches in other cities as well. So one of the things that, one of the ways that we have planted churches across our nation is through Bible colleges. So we have people coming from different cities and they would come, they would study here and some of them would approach and say, hey, I want to start a church in my hometown. So they go back, we help them to start a church initially, just help them to plant the church, give them spiritual guidance, just be a backbone, be a support to them. And so all of our, almost all of our outreach churches have been started that way. Most of them are BC alumni, Bible college students who've passed on, right? So envision them again, where even as Bible college students go, give them, you know, options to start church plans and be there to give them spiritual oversight, spiritual direction, nurture to build them up, right? Now here's the thing, in the initial of this phase of sending out people, planting news churches in cities and towns, the senior pastor will have to make decisions, right? Because now planting a church could involve a lot of finances, a lot of buying of material, you know, in terms of renting out a space, buying chairs, buying speakers, so the senior pastor has to be involved, right? And once the church has established and started maybe three, four months down the line, you can send people there, that's what the church in Jerusalem did. You see in the book of Acts, they sent Barnabas to Antioch because Antioch, the church was growing and it was a new church plant. So Barnabas went there, Barnabas said, hey, I need some help here, he goes and finds Saul of Thassus. And that's how they launched out on their first missionary journey after that. So it's good to do this, right? Even as they plant, now if you feel that you're financially not yet there to help a church plant, it's all right, right? It's all right, give it some time, right? You can also encourage them to, you know, start in a small way, maybe, you know, sell group or the small group and then encourage them to build on that, right? So some of the urban church growth models that we see, one of the most common models is Yoido Full Gospel in Soil Kareah, which is David Paul Yongi Cho, where he for many years was, the church was, you know, just stuck in a certain space, right, a certain number, but he used the model of sell groups. And through the sell groups, same thing with the Bogoda church in Columbia, here also, they replicated Yoido Full Gospel and in a couple of years the church began to expand and enlarge hundreds and thousands of people started coming to sell groups, eventually they were connected to the church, right? So then you have different kinds of churches, Calvary Temple in Hyderabad, which has, again, a huge following, Willow Creek Community, Saddleback Church, which is Rick Warren's church, Mars Hill, Marcus Call, Elevation Church, which Elevation is one of the churches which have live stream and satellite campuses, right? So, and then there was huge explosive church growth in East Africa as well, not only East Africa and the entire nation of Africa. There was huge churches. People used different kinds of models and of church growth and God was, you know, just building the church. So the APC Biblical Blueprint model is something that we always follow is that every believer is a minister and each one of us can reach out the gospel for Jesus Christ, right? And these growth models, yes, growth is not only physical in numbers, but it's also in the spiritual, right? So we'll stop here. We'll pick up from spiritual aspects next class, that'll be next week. And we'll build on this. I hope and I do know that each one of us are learning and but it'll be good to really, you know, use these pointers. If you've been thinking about starting a church or how to go about it, you know, these pointers will definitely help, right? You know, sometimes it's just that initial step and then once you get into it, you know, God is faithful. He will support us. He will strengthen us, right? Zellie says, sorry, it was the year 2003. Wow. Thank you Zellie for sharing. All right. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you for joining this class and we'll catch up next week. Continue on the spiritual aspects when it comes to church planting, right? God bless. Have a great week ahead. Thank you, Pastor. Welcome, welcome.