Church Planting (Our Approach)

The goal of church planting with Ethnos360 is to work among the unreached where there is not Gospel believing church and help see a church planted. Ethnos360 has the goal of planting mature churches which takes years of hard work and discipleship. Our approach is based on the photo above which we call The Big Picture, the Mature Church Model. We have completed the training and support raising in order to begin this process. After moving to Papua New Guinea, we learned the local language of Tok Pisin and in June of 2019 we moved into the a small village in the heart of Papua New Guinea among the Lembena People. We are currently in the midst of language and culture study with the goal of learning the language well enough to be able to share the deep truths of the Gospel. This will take several more years but we want to be able to preach the gospel at a deep level that the people will be able to fully understand and to understand their culture well enough to be able to speak into it. This is the most important message anyone will ever here and we want to give it clearly. If the gospel is presented without clarity, the result is a warped understanding of the gospel and only creates more confusion and syncretism (mixing of beliefs) which has already happened among our people. To ensure that those we are working with will have a solid understanding of the message, we will take several years to learn the language well and seek to better understand the culture, which plays a huge part of how they will interpret what we are saying.

Our people, like many tribal groups, cannot read and write in their own language so we hope to finish developing an alphabet and to help teach the people to read and write in their own language. Once we are able to teach, we will start in the beginning of the Bible and teach chronologically and so would lay a solid foundation for the gospel to be presented like a “wise master builder” (1 Cor. 3:10).  When the gospel is presented and the church born, we will begin discipling and training the new believers as we continue to translate lessons and the Bible. The goal is maturity and we know that maturity takes time and hard work. We hope to raise up elders and deacons who can shepherd their own people and for the church to send out missionaries of their own to the surrounding villages while we as missionaries have worked ourselves out of a job. Will you join us in seeing this vision become reality?