June 19, 2012, (Tacloban) David White, church planter and author of “Anyone Can Lead” came to Tacloban City, Leyte and organized the new set of Bayanihan Church Planting facilitators. There are about 10-15 pastors and workers who came; they are those who finished as coaches last year.
It was really a seminar to prepare the facilitators in forming their own network group so that more people will be trained for church planting efforts.
Bayanihan Church Planting is a church planting program where church planting efforts comes from the church members itself. Bayanihan means “corporate effort” or in a sense “cooperative effort”. The idea is that the church itself will be doing the church planting. With the help of the coach (the pastor of the church) and the team leader (anyone who commits to lead the group), members of the local church will engage themselves in church planting.
This time, it’s not just the pastors or any hired church planter will plant churches, but members and the church itself will be involve in church planting increasing the awareness of the necessity of evangelism and church reproduction.
But the newest thing that will probably be applied in the system is the use of Training for Trainers (T4T). David White has found T4T’s underlying principles to have more potential for massive evangelism strategy in comparison to what is currently used which is Outreach Bible Study method. However, it must be noted that contextual T4T is still being studied.
The core idea of T4T is conducting Bible study while at the same time training the Bible study group in teaching their families, relatives and friends about what they have learned right after the Bible study. It uses Bible stories to make it easier to remember. Outreach Bible Study on the other hand is teaching the group about the core foundation of Christianity using the book of Ephesians. OBS has been proven to be very effective in Filipino context.
With all these, our churches can look forward to give birth to many more Christian churches not only in the Philippines, but also in the world.
