On our recent "Ask Anything" text-your-question weekend we received about a zillion questions. Unable to address them all during those services, I'm recruiting leaders at GCC to tackle a few more.
In this post Rob Wegner addresses the question, "Can you tell us more about our work in India?"
Here's Rob's answer:
GCC has been partnering with a church planting movement in Tamil Nadu, India since 2002. As a church, we partner with new churches in India to help them become two things:
1) A thriving, healthy purpose-driven church
2) The hub for community transformation in their village.
From the very beginning, we have built this partnership through mutual respect, as equals with our partners there. We’ve also made every effort to build the initiatives to be self-sustaining and reproducible. After seven years of labor, it’s amazing to see the impact. We’ve helped plant and train over 600 churches, with a cumulative impact of over 120,000 disciples now passionately following Jesus in those churches.
We now have multiple layers of training that are being replicated by indigenous leaders.
Kingdom of God Training: This the feeder system that provides 18 months of intensive church planting training and coaching based on the five purposes and holistic ministry. We currently have 250 church planters enrolled.
Purpose Driven Training: PDT takes the most promising planters and offers them an additional 18 months of training and coaching in a contextualized Purpose Driven paradigm.
Leadership Development Training: LDT takes an even smaller number of PDT graduates who are high capacity and equips them to become the “pastor of pastors,” who not only oversee their church, but other groups of churches and church planters. We affectionately call them the “Super Pastors.”
Community Transformation Training: CTT equips the graduates of LDT to empower and mobilize their congregations with the skills required from community development initiatives. So far, community development initiatives are being rolled out in seven villages and include issues ranging from construction, water, micro-enterprise/micro-finance, justice, medical, and conversational English.
GCC actually has an entire staff team on site in India which is led by our Director of International Mission, Rajendran. Check out his blog for regular reports from the front line.
I am new at GCC. I have a questions?
Im was raised in a small country church in IL. I was able to talk to someone that would help me with questions.
GCC is a large church. I do feel a little lost.
1. Were can I go to speak to someone that who is truly interested in helping me find God? And keeping him in my life.
Posted by: TERRY TIPTON | February 16, 2009 at 01:31 PM