Wheaton College EVAN 694-1: Planting and Growing Reproducing Churches Student: Luis Fernando #76078

Interview 2: pr. Cameron Young

Name of Church: Igreja Batista do Caminho Location: Fortaleza, Brazil Denominational Affiliation: Baptist Convention Age of church: 4 years old Average weekend celebration service attendance: 60 people and has spawned a daughter church of another 20. Questions: 1. What circumstances led you to believe that God was calling you to plant a church? I joined this church plant enterprise two years after its start after I resigned from my mega-church position after a disagreement with the senior pastor of that church. I told that pastor that wherever I went would be based largely on two criteria: the vision of the pastor and his personal integrity. In this case I was a long time personal friend and accountability partner of the pastor of the church plant and while had serious reservations about his strategy, I was thrilled by where he said he wanted to see the church go. 2. What is the vision and/or mission for the church you have planted? My ministry partner and I have seen the church as consequence and not as the center of a Christians life in Christ. We understand that many Christians have the institution as the primary expression of their faith and in so doing have given up their greatest privilege as saints, that of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We have assumed for the institution Pauls statement that he should decrease so that Christ increases. We understand that as Christians come together with other Christians, each on their own faith

journey, the church happens. We believe in a relational church. First of all it is each member in a growing dynamic and personal relationship with God and, second, living out that transformation in relationship to others of like faith, and last of all, living a relational freedom and relational love with those who still have not found their way out of sin and to Christ. 3. How did you develop your launch team (paid staff and volunteers)? The launch team was basically one person who already worked professionally as a banker and simply gathered around them some people interested in worshiping together. To that God has added people from the neighborhood in a very simple, natural manner. 4. How did you choose a site or location both geographically (city, region) and specifically (theater, school)? The primary criteria for the location were the availability and appropriateness of the location, which was in a preschool owned by the uncle of the founding pastor. The choice was not geographically specific, so much so that we are now in our fourth location. 5. What did it cost to plant the church prior to your public launch? How much of that were you responsible for rising? What is your strategy for becoming self supporting? The church had no funding for its start up since the pastor was a tent maker and the location was ceded free of charge. Early offerings were used primarily to buy sound and projection equipment, chairs, literature, and office supplies. The strategy was always that pastors would be at least partially self-supported. No outside financial help for the institution was ever given by anyone. 6. What is your strategy for leadership development? Artist development? Leadership development has been largely one on one investment in the lives of the members. Artistic development has included sponsoring the visit of traveling musical artists, subsidizing courses for some of the musicians and encouraging the musicians to

invest in the lives and artistic development of one another. 7. What resources would you recommend to someone considering churchplanting? Like most of the institutional church we have become so institutional minded that we actually talk about church planting. Jesus never said anything about church planting, nor did he ever plant a church. The Great Commission is not to go out and plant churches in all places. We were taught to go out and make disciples. Who was suppose to make the disciples were Christians, not churches. Churches are gatherings of Christians, nothing more, nothing less. The focus on church planting makes it all about the institution. The basic unit of the Christian faith is not the church, but THE CHRISTIAN THE CHRIST FOLLOWER. Get that wrong and you get the modern monoliths that are the modern symbol of the Christian faith. More and more it is about the saltshaker and not the salt. More and more it is about doing church rather than living loved and loving. Do I have a resource to recommend? yes. Read, So You Dont Want to Go to Church Anymore. By Wayne Jacobsen. Read The Pressure is Off, by Larry Crabb. Read, The Satisfying Life, by Bud McCord. Read He Loves Me, by Wayne Jacobsen. Read No Perfect People by John Burke. Enough said. 8. What is your plan to reproduce new locations/campuses/churches? Our little congregation has already spawned a congregation of members who stayed behind and assumed independent life at one of the locations we used for a time, but it was convenient, not strategic. Do we have a plan? Yes, to follow God one day at a time. Could that include new locations/campuses/churches? Yes, but only if He show that because we are following His plan, not ours, because we are sheep, not pastors (a title only used in the NT once, and that in reference to Jesus Christ). Once again, get the basic unit of Christianity wrong and you start down a track that, while it may work from the perspective of reaching institutional goals, does not teach the people to walk with and under God's direction, because the leadership itself is not walking with and under Gods direction.