DAWN Fridayfax 2003 #37

Portugal

4,000 churches by 2015

The Portuguese Evangelical Alliance has an official church planting strategy: under the leadership of pastor Paulo Mendez, a plan based on the Dawn strategy was developed, aiming to reach a total of 4,000 evangelical churches in Portugal by the year 2015. In 1960, there were 291; the number had grown to 894 in 1980 and 1,630 in 2000. "If the trend continues and the Portuguese churches plant churches at the same rate as in the recent past, there will be 4,000 in the year 2015," says Dawn European Network's Reinhold Scharnowski.
Source: Dawn Report 51/2003

Norway

Europe needs 500,000 new churches? Let's go!

A dynamic youth movement called Jesus Revolution, founded by Stefan and Anne Christiansen a few years ago, has set up a Christian student group in every high school in Norway. During a church planting conference, Stefan realised that it's not enough to simply start groups - they should be planting churches. Under the motto "Europe needs 500,000 new churches? Let's go!", they have so far planted three churches in Norway and several in European cities by sending out teams of young church planters. The movement now has a church planting school, leadership academy, media services etc.
Source: www.jesusrevolution.org

SE Asia

Six million new churches planned

"Church planters met for a conference in a southeast Asian nation difficult for Westerners to enter. They learned about the possibilities of a rapidly multiplying church planting movement," writes Donna Greene in the Dawn Report. After recognising the strategic dimension and the nature of rapidly spreading house churches, the participants set a goal of planting six million new house churches in the next ten years. "Are these goals impossible?" asked Hannah Ems, one of the event's organisers. "Agreed - only God can fulfill such a vision. But where there is no vision, the people perish. A God-sized task requires a God-sized vision."
Source: Dawn Report 51/03

Latin America

The role of cities and houses

Berna Salcedo, the Dawn Movement's Latin American coordinator, reports that the continent's flourishing church planting movement has developed two promising emphases in the past two years: cities and houses. The movements' leaders aim to develop strategies for reaching 194 major cities with the Gospel through church planting. The second emphasis is on houses; "House churches are a relatively new development for South America," says Salcedo, "but initial experiences in Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia and Chile are very positive." Peru had 9,000 traditional churches at the start of the national church planting strategy in 1993. Today, there are 21,000 - but church leaders believe that over three times as many Christian meetings take place in homes. One church in Chile started 74 new house churches in one year. At the end of last year, Ric Escobar and Jairo Gutierrez trained twenty leaders of one Colombian church to plant simple house churches. Fifty have already been planted, with the aim of 200 this year.
Source: Berna Salcedo, Dawn Report 51/2003, www.dawnministries.org

USA

Dropout becomes a missionary

"After two tours in Vietnam and fourteen years homeless, Greg Esslair is now about to graduate from the Christian Vanguard University in California," reported AoG News on 14th August 2003. "I'm a real re-entry student," he laughs, "re-entry - from orbit!" In 1968, he shortened a jail term by joining the Army. After being honourably discharged from the Army, and limping after his broken leg was treated wrongly in Vietnam, he married and started work in an Anaheim power company. He became an alcoholic, and ended up homeless in 1980. "I was a four-star drinker. I tried everything - psychologists, witches, acupuncture, hypnosis - but I simply could not stop drinking." For fourteen years, he limped around the Tustin area, begging for money, until doctors told him that he had only six months left to live because of liver problems. One night, in a deserted filling station, he cried out to God, asking him to touch him with just a drop of his power. "It was like Pentecost," he says today. He was suddenly free of his alcoholism, and no longer woke up at night covered in a cold sweat after nightmares about the war. After a while, he went back to school, and to his complete surprise, passed all exams. "I drank half my brain away, and hadn't been in school for thirty years...!" In a dream, he saw himself studying the Bible under the trees of a Bible School! Soon afterwards, he started at the Bible School, where he is now in the 5th semester, studying part time, because he is also a preacher at the OC Rescue Mission, Coordinator of the Shelter and Hunger Partnership in his church and Chaplain of a Vietnam Veterans group. He has also been to Vietnam on five short-term mission trips, helping orphans and leprosy sufferers.
Source: www.ag.org

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