DAWN Fridayfax 2000 #42

India

AoG plans 1,200 new house churches in the next 12 months

The Pentecostal movement Assemblies of God in Tamil Nadu, southern India, has decided to plant more house churches in future. "In the 50 years of our existence, we have grown to around 1,000 churches. At that tempo, we will hardly ever reach Tamil Nadu's 17,000 unreached villages," says Superintendent P.S. Rajamoni. Rajamoni, Pastor D. Mohan and Pastor Ratnam Paul invited representatives of the church to regional strategy meetings in Madras, Madurai and Palayamkottai, at which they called on pastors and church members to plant house churches. Field Director David Stewart Sen. spoke about the task of planting 25,000 house churches in the near future, and Wolfgang Simson described the challenge to "find indigenous, multiplyable forms of church in the dual context of persecution and revival, which are as close as possible to the New Testament and apostolic models." The initial reaction to the conferences is a plan to plant 1,200 new house churches in the next 12 months, according to the AoG's Missions Secretary Joshua Pillai. "An average of 49 traditional churches close each week in the United States," says Rajamoni. "We must develop our own Indian model to reach the unreached, which is appropriate for our situation. House churches can do this."

Attendance grows by 1,000

"Prior to the strategy conferences, our small leadership team met to pray and fast about the future of our movement," says D. Mohan, pastor of the New Life Assemblies of God in Madras. "It was as though the Holy Spirit came upon us, revealing house churches to us. Within a very short period, the number of people attending our Sunday Celebrations has grown by 1,000 to 17,000," he says.
Source: D. Mohan, Joshua Pillai, e-mail subi@satyam.net.in, and P.S. Rajamoni, P.O. Box 21, Madurai 625016, India

Myanmar

A way to new authority

"It looked like any other evening in the village in Myanmar, until the district police showed up, looking for a Christian preacher named Maung. Quickly and without questions, Maung was arrested and bound. He was then mercilessly beaten in front of his wife and two-year-old daughter," reports 'Gospel for Asia'. He was left, still bound, in front of the village chief's house overnight, and taken to jail the next morning. "The Lord spoke to me during this terrible time," says Maung, "reminding me of his suffering on the cross for me. I decided to never stop preaching Jesus, should I survive." He was able to speak about Jesus to the prison guards and inmates, because they all wanted to know why he had been imprisoned. "His church prayed for him, and many appealed on his behalf. Finally, he was released, and started to speak with an authority which he had not known before. It is as though the Glory of God is in him. Twenty-three people have been saved, and the church meetings have to be held during the week as well as on Sunday, because the meeting rooms are too small. Bible reading and prayer for the lost have become Maung's top daily priorities, everything else is of secondary importance. He and the other Christians are still a small minority in their village, and experience much resistance, but "that's no problem," as Maung says."
Source: Gospel for Asia, 1800 Golden Trail Ct., Carrollton TX 75010. USA. e-mail: info@gfa.org

Canada

Can laypeople start house churches?

"Nothing should hinder Canadian denominations from encouraging hundreds of thousands of laypeople to start and lead a house church of up to 20 people in their homes," writes 'Church Planting Canada' magazine in its latest issue. The Foursquare Gospel Church is the first Canadian denomination to appoint national coordinators for the planting of home-based churches, Doug and Ellie Hagey. "Alpha courses are perhaps the most potent incubator of house churches in the West," writes the magazine. "At the end of an Alpha course, the group can easily continue to exist as a house church." The national church planting movement 'Outreach Canada' has already created an informal resource network, one of the aims of which is to assist in creating reproducible house church networks. (See www.outreach.ca/cpc/housechurches.htm).
Source: Church Planting Canada 4th Quarter 2000, fax (+1) 604 502 1667

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