Ep 2: The Critique of Church Planting Movements

There is a movement of God in the New Testament, no doubt. It’s not a church planting movement as it’s understood today. It was much more significant and it connected the story of God to the story of people.

As church planting movements (CPMs) have drawn the attention of missionary practitioners around the world, missiologists are looking closely at this phenomenon and asking challenging questions. In recent years, a few of those questions posed by Jackson Wu and a cadre of missiologists from the International Mission Board as well as professors from predominately Southern Baptist Convention seminaries, contested the methods of CPMs including T4T and DMM as well as called attention to an apparent biblical eisegesis as advocates were accused of reading CPM into the New Testament texts.

More on CPM

Dr. Cooper earned a PhD in Intercultural Studies with a focus on religious movements and a minor in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He currently serves as a missiologist for a missions agency where he focuses on missiological research and equipping missionaries for effective cultural engagement. He has thirty years of missions experience, including ten years as a pioneer church planter in Romania after the fall of communism and has equipped church planters and movement leaders in Africa, Europe, North America, South America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. He has written and contributed to more than 30 books and academic articles and has presented conference lectures at the London School of Economics, University of Bordeaux, Loyola University, Baylor University, and many others. His recent book, Ephesiology: The Study of the Ephesian Movement is a best seller at William Carey Publishing.

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