Breaking Tradition to Accomplish Vision: Training Leaders for a Church-Planting Movement

This is not a book on church planting for those who are afraid of change, correction, and even shifting to a new paradigm for training leaders. It was forged in the furnace of failure to accomplish the goal of training leaders and shows the wisdom of course correction and the difference it makes. It is co-authored by Paul Gupta who deals with his experience in seeing traditional formal leadership training in a new way and missiological explanations by Sherwood Lingfelter to explain what has happened.The three major parts of this book are:1. How can a school train church planters?2. The birth of a national church-planting movement.3. Challenges to accomplish the vision.So here is a book that speaks to training institutions, church planters, and those who long to facilitate a movement that plants churches. Here is help for moving to a new paradigm as a training institution broke with the traditional way of training in order to produce more effective pastors, church planters, and teachers.This book is a gold mine of information on seeing an indigenous church planting movement take place. The main means were by the use of non-formal training, being willing to constantly assess and correct the trajectory of a movement, and by teaching church planters to be cross-cultural missionaries.There is too much in this exciting book to give a full review but let's follow the advice of the late Paul Hiebert who states, "It is essential reading for those around the world who are involved in higher Christian education and church planting." Endorsement in this book, p. 246.

I appreciate at least 3 things about this book. First, I appreciate that it affirms theological education. I get the feeling that many think that theological education is a hindrance to, if not completely incompatible with, church planting movements. So I appreciate that this book affirms the vital long-term role that theological education can play in developing leaders; at the same time it recognizes honestly that formally structured theological education simply cannot keep pace with the quantity of leaders anticipated in a movement. Second, Dr Gupta is transparent about his "course corrections" and how they addressed those. That is really helpful. Third, the book shows the many forms theological education takes at various levels (and the different kinds of students drawn by each); this is a good challenge to those of us in theological education to take an honest look at how to effectively train leaders; there is no "one size fits all".

Great road map and encouragement for anyone looking to transition a traditional lecture-style training format into one more field and discipleship based. It has been a great help for our work in South Sudan.

Dr. Gupta brings a fresh perspective to the simplicity of the church and how it must reproduce to be healthy and the church Christ gave His life to redeem. His perspective comes from his work with the church in India but is very applicable to the church in America.

Thnaks to the authors for dealing with a much needed understanding of what is to be done for equipping people for fruitfil evangelism/church planting. The difference between "education" and "training" needs to be more widely understood, and that too much emphasis upon "education often limits "ministry" results.

If you lived in a country where Christians were a tiny minority, despised and rejected by many, amongst more than a billion people, and you thought part of God's vision for the country was to have a million churches planted in the country, what would you do? That is the question addressed by Bobby Gupta and Sherwood Lingenfelter in this book.Gupta's father founded the Hindustan Bible Institute in 1952 with the purpose of giving every person in India an opportunity to see, hear and respond to the gospel. In 1967, HBI became affiliated with Serampore University so that its degrees could be accredited, and by the mid 1980s when Bobby Gupta inherited responsibility for HBI, most of the students were coming to get degrees, not to train for mission.The book describes the re-purposing of HBI to focus on training church planters, rather than conferring degrees, and the efforts of Gupta and others to convince the church in India to embrace the church-planting vision. Over a period of five years, the number of churches in India increased three-fold, resulting in enormous leadership training needs. It is an inspiring story, and challenges readers to think about how we should be responding to God's church planting vision.