Church Planting in Poland

Teresa usually writes our letters, but I wanted to share with you what God has been showing me as I have been reading through Nehemiah. I was intrigued by the similarities between him and modern day urban church planters. Qualities like being a person of prayer, able to motivate others to be involved in the task, has integrity which inspires trust in his followers, takes risks, perseveres through trials, and has learning agility to adjust strategies and to be a life-long learner. I could go on but I think you get the picture. When Nehemiah gets the news about the situation in Jerusalem he weeps, mourns, fasts, and prays and then God gives him a plan of action. The king agreed to send him and even gave Nehemiah all the resources he would need. Nehemiah then needed to rally the Jews living in and near Jerusalem to rebuild the wall. The result of his work was the wall being finished in less then 2 months. I would love to see men like Nehemiah planting churches in the cities of the world!

Recently, I felt like Nehemiah when City to City Meeting in NYC he first heard the news about the situation in Jerusalem. I wept, prayed, and decided to take the action God was showing me to do.  

Kalisz, a city of 103,000 with one evangelical church

Teresa and I have been to Poland many times and we understand the huge task ahead for the church as there are less then 1% evangelical believers and a handful of churches in this country of 40 million. There are cities with millions and those with thousands that have only a few churches. One city of 100,000 has one church and one city of 1,000,000 has 15 small congregations. After the fall of communism only a handful of missionaries came to help and most have already left. The situation is bleak. While I understood all of this I did not know the following, which at first brought disbelief, and then a resolve to do something. It might seem small but I know from being a part of helping to plant 100s of churches in the former Soviet Union that without this one thing we will not see new churches in the foreseeable future.

What is it you ask? It is a course for church planting in the Polish language. For the last 26 years no Pole has had the privilege of being able to use a curriculum in their own language. If a church planter did not know English well he was not even able to think how to go about the process of planting. It seems like a small thing but I thought about all the churches that might have been planted and all those who could have heard the gospel through those churches. Why had no one thought to do this? While Church planting material is not the only answer it is a source for casting vision, preparing the harvest force, and giving this young generation of Polish believers hope for what could be. No seminary or Bible college offers church planter training but there are glimpses of hope as we see men and women beginning to catch the vision. We will have a meeting with key Polish leaders the first week of March to discuss this issue and how we can help.

Prayer Requests
• more church planters in the cities of Poland
• monies for church planting material in Polish
• vision from Polish leaders for a church planting conference
• wisdom & perseverance for us
• A meeting with 25 denominal leaders in Kiev, Ukraine to discuss church planting Feb. 17-18.