This is the 5th and final installment of a series exploring Novo’s foundational influences and 40 year history. You can read part 1 here.
Throughout this mini blog-series unpacking the spiritual and missional influences that shaped Novo over the past 40 years, we’ve been highlighting the way God was equipping us for our specific organizational calling to multiply gospel movements around the world. From our roots with The Navigators, to the training at the Fuller School of World Mission, and the intentional pursuit of understanding strategic prayer and supernatural reality, we can see how God was always at work building a strong foundation in the components of gospel movements.
We wrap up this series by examining how God has equipped Novo in the final movement component, Church Forming.
Novo’s Early Vision for Church Forming
In December of 1979, the visionary founders of CRM (now Novo), wrote a letter inviting Chuck Singletary, who would become Novo’s first president, to join them in their new missionary endeavor. The letter described the key goals and strategies they envisioned for this new mission organization. One of these key strategies was church planting.
Why church planting? Because they suspected that to build that deep DNA of disciple making into the Body of Christ, new churches that carried the vision for being disciples who make disciples from the start would be necessary. CRM staff would do what they could as consultants and servants to existing local congregations to increase their commitment to discipleship and mission, but forming new churches would ultimately be a necessity.
These early CRM staff had been well prepared for the work of church consulting and church forming through their studies at the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary. Donald McGavrin, who founded the school (and was still there at the time they attended), was widely recognized in missiological circles as the “Father of Church Growth.” These principles of church growth are not about gimmicks, techniques, or number games. Based on the behavioral sciences—especially anthropology and sociology—they seek to understand “why individuals and groups of people would respond to the Christian message, and what would impede and facilitate the growth of the Church.” In his booklet, Too Great to Count, Novo-US President Sam Metcalf writes that the School of World Mission “began to give us tools to understand the complexities of how the body of Christ organically evolves with many members.”
McGavrin’s conviction that the heart of the Christian mission is to make disciples and have them function as fruitful members of the body of Christ was incredibly influential to Novo’s founders. “In all that we do with leaders,” Sam Metcalf writes, “we want them to function as effective leaders for the big ‘C’ Church. [Novo’s] work with leaders is not done in a vacuum. Concepts such as connectedness, community, and the broader body of Christ are integral to our calling.”
Thus, in the early years and decades of Novo’s existence as a mission entity, there was a huge emphasis on investing in local churches and church planting efforts. Novo staff planted churches and put together a “church planting tool kit” to train other leaders to do the same. They worked as consultants and coaches for churches, and created processes to form deeper missionality in existing churches. Novo staff are still involved in such efforts today.
A Strong Foundation for Forming Churches Out of Movements
But our work to form and develop churches (both new and old) has often been outside of traditional Western molds. Our understanding of missiology and culture has influenced what we envision when we describe “church.” Rather than fit one model or “form,” we believe the Body of Christ needs to reflect the culture and background of the disciples that are part of it.
Novo has a rich history of exploring and forming “new” expressions of church in different countries and cultures, including post-modern, post-Christian ones, that might look a little different but have all the essential functions of a church. So, we may find a small group of the Body of Christ meeting in a coffee shop to read scripture in Scotland, a small but diverse house church gathering in a multicultural neighborhood in Minneapolis, or a large gathering of families with disabled children coming together in Egypt.
Putting our emphasis on the essential functions of a church, rather than one specific form (i.e. a building with a pastor/preacher and music), has enabled us to navigate the intricacies of church forming as a component of a gospel movement. In the gospel movements that we help catalyze, sustain, and multiply, new disciples emerge from small, rapidly multiplying Bible study groups that use a simple “discovery process,” hence they are called Discovery Bible Studies (DBSs) or “discovery groups.” No experts, preachers, or teachers are initially needed. Everyone can participate, even among those who may not be able to read or write. Discovery groups are highly effective among people far from God, and we see astonishing results among every culture, demographic, and socio-economic grouping.
The truth of the Bible, coupled with the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit, is a powerful combination that results in men, women, and children from every imaginable background encountering God and deciding to wholeheartedly follow Christ as Lord.
Eventually as a gospel movement grows, these groups may expand or they may be brought together with other groups to form a larger church gathering. But the basic DNA (functions) of a local church (worship, prayer and service, obedience to God, and telling the good news to others) is built into each DBS cell from the very beginning. Simple questions members ask one another every time they meet reinforces the necessity of obedience to what God has said.
We believe that where there is a gospel movement, churches will form; not every church plant will result in gospel movement (in fact, very few will). As we focus on the work of gospel movements, we know that many new church expressions will ultimately result. These churches may be more organic, smaller, or surprising to Western eyes in the forms they take. But where the Holy Spirit is at work, where the Body of Christ is growing as disciples and caring for one another, where obedience and sharing the good news of Jesus is present, and where the truth of God and scripture is central, we trust that the churches that emerge will have all the essential DNA to bring glory to God and be wonderful expressions of his Kingdom on earth.