Helping Warriors

Helping Warriors on the Front Lines

December 2006

The Church Planting Institute (CPI) has been dreaming how we could help more people in frontline church planting­ ministry. Last fall seemed busier than when we have a national conference as we had several key regional training events.

A Church Planting Network Seminar was attended by 11 people, all by invitation, in mid-October. Attendees were from several groups areas of Japan. From this seminar there are several agencies that are seriously considering forming church planting networks in their regions. CPI is interested in not only planting churches but also planting networks and teams that will birth multiplying churches and renewal movements.

The Hokkaido Regional CPI Seminar, a two-day seminar (Nov 3, 4) on Renewal and Evangelism was attended by about 70 people from many agencies and denominations with nearly half being Japanese. Both John and Elaine conducted training on spiritual renewal. Many who attended came with the expressed intention of supporting a CPI related alliance for church planting in Hokkaido and several key pastors are involved. One Japanese comment was, “this was a meeting greatly blessed of God. I would like to teach it to all the pastors and lay people in Hokkaido.” There is a possibility of another day seminar in the Spring of next year.

The Karuizawa Equipping Seminar one-day seminar (Nov 11) was on the topic of Focusing: vision and values and was attended by 22 people. John shared about understanding our personal calls from God. There were only five missionaries present so the percent of Japanese was over 75%! One Japanese said, “I would like CPI to be introduced to other church pastors that God’s Kingdom and glory would become one in our area.”

This year through the various regional seminars we have trained about 300 people serving on the front lines. These three events were all very positive and a gold mine of lessons for CPI as to how be best equip people for ministry on the front lines. This will have profound impact on future regional seminars and also future national conferences. There may be some more grassroots regional equipping seminars in the Spring of 2007. Pray for these preparations.

The next CPI Japan National Conference will be November 6-9, 2007 (Tues–Fri) near Mt. Fuji. We need short-term volunteers to help with the children’s, youth, technical and other ministry teams. We are excited that several of our partnering churches are planning to be a part of this key national event.

John and Elaine Mehn
Serving in Japan as your missionaries

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