IMB reorg and CPM (Church Planting Movement) Methodology
I am currently a team leader with the IMB, International Mission Board, and have been in Europe for 10 years. From the beginning, we have been trained on Church Planting Movements (CPMs) but have always had concerns with this methodology. We have chosen instead to work through local churches in the Core Missionary Task (see Foundations document).
Recently, we got a new Affinity Leader who beforehand worked in India and he has been training us all on CPM methods and the 5 T's, with an accountability component to comply with training these simple, reproducible tools. Those of us doing traditional / proclamational / church-centered methods have felt more and more side-lined and devalued in our org. With Jacob in the Global Engagement role and looking to bring the whole org under CPM methods, my wife and I worry that those of us who are church-centered will have no place with the company.
We believe the IMB serves Southern Baptist churches and should be taking their direction from churches, meaning that missionaries like us should be given freedom to practice missions the way it has been done for centuries and not implementing the movement strategies of a few individuals in IMB leadership. The biggest issue we have with CPM methodologies being proposed is that our leaders apply a poor hermeneutic to the book of Acts and see Acts as the "playbook for missionaries today."
Our new Affinity Leader says that the book of Acts is normative and that we should be like Paul: itinerant, staying in a place just long enough to gather people together and appoint elders and move on. The definition of church and whether the group needs to identify as church is left to the participants of the group to decide.
Also, we are comparing our work to that of Paul. The problem is that we are not Apostles (having seen the risen Christ and appointed by Him), capable of miracles and wonders, and single (all of which Paul was), we feel a tension that we cannot succeed with the new expectations.
I write this to see if there are others out there struggling with these same things. If that's you, would you reply to this conversation?