“I do not know anything about church planting.” Pastor Renate shared his reality as we walked into the village. “I just know I’m called to be a missionary”. Yet last month, with no specific training, he decided to move ahead by visiting families, listening to their stories and praying. And that resulted in one family opening their home for a bible study, leading to another new church planting work getting launched!

Our director, Mark, was recently back in the Philippines for the EFCP’s Church Planting Cohort in Surigao, on the island of Mindanao. The EFCP has launched about 120 news churches in the last three years. The purpose of the Cohort, a peer coaching and equipping network, is to help support pastors like Renate, those with a missional calling, to establish reproducing faith communities. Leaders facilitated discussions around the topic of Transformation: Romans 12:1-2, specifically, our worldview being transformed to be catalysts for Christ-Centered Community Transformation (CCCT) to help people live a better life, make disciples and plant churches.

As a part of each Cohort, the group visits local church plants for practical peer learning about best practices and to encourage the local church planters. They had the blessing of visiting with the family that was helping Pastor Renate and they were able to pray for them (pictured above) and for God to continue to lead in establishing this new church. Renate said there was no evangelical church in the area, and that the ground was hard. There is lots of resistance to the church planting work.

Through the Cohort, Renate found out about a church planter training being held on another island in September, and he plans to attend. The Cohort hopes to further equip and provide coaching for him and several other local pastors in the region to use a CCCT approach to engage the community and soften the ground.

Pray for Renate and the church planting efforts on Mindanao.

-For the Holy Spirit to open doors in the community and connect more families to the bible study.

-For more men and women, like Renate, with a missional call to plant churches in the Philippines, and for a team to form around Renate to multiply churches in his area.

-For on-going mentorship and support through the Church Planting Cohort to encourage all of church planters who are already serving.

Serve: Email crisisresponse@efca.org if your church might be interested in sending a small short-term team to run an ESL camp, VBS, kids art camp or similar to partner with the EFCP in church planting efforts.

Likewise, you can send us an email if you might be interested in serving with our team to invest in the mission field that follows crisis.

Give: Give to sustain church planting efforts and CCCT through the relationships between Crisis Response, the EFCP and the Church Planting Cohort.