More and more denominational leaders in Africa are turning their denominations and churches into church planting movements. This is reported by DAWN Africa coordinator Danie Vermeulen.

 

The Apostolic Faith Mission in Lesotho, a denomination that started in South Africa in 1908 by Canadian missionary John G. Lake, committed to see its 35 churches reproduce themselves within the next 2 years. Their 20 Bible school students are required to plant a church before they graduate. Church planting will also become a compulsory subject.

 

In Benin DAWN Africa trained 50 master church planting trainers. These men were carefully selected by their churches and set apart to do church planting training in their respective denominations. Their individual goal in 2004 was to each train another 10 church planters, resulting in 500 newly trained church planters. By December 2005 they had already trained 800 church planters. This has resulted in 156 new church plants, with many more reports of newly planted churches coming in on a weekly basis.

 

In Malawi, known as the 'warm heart of Africa', a country that has seen an aggressive expansion of mosques funded by Libya, the church is also making progress. Bishop Harry Dwart Kaitano, who heads up a denomination of over 500 churches comprising about 300,000 members, attended a church planting training himself. At the graduation he remarked that he couldn't wait to get all his pastors together so that he could train them to become church planter trainers. In the last 6 months Bishop Kaitano has trained over 200 church planters and as a result planted over 100 more churches.

 

Source: www.dawnafrica.co.za