237 Leaders Served!
I grew up by one of the original five McDonalds restaurants. Those early McDonalds used to have a sign out front with how many hamburgers they had served. It seemed like it would change weekly. First it listed thousands, then 100 thousands, then millions. After a while they stopped counting and just said billions and billions served.
Our ministry in Japan in some sense is like those first McDonalds. We are making progress but often the numbers served do not seem to be significant. Since 2005, the Church Planting Institute (CPI) embarked on a new adventure of taking our equipping training for church planting closer to those who really need it, those on the front-lines throughout Japan. We envision becoming more of a movement of equipping people in ministry skills. For our 2005 CPI National Conference we raised up 9 training teams for equipping training. And so over the past 18 months we have sent out these training teams.
A few weeks ago, the last of these CPI Regional Equipping Seminars held throughout 2006 and into this spring took place. Over this period, CPI has had 8 regional seminars, in 5 regions of Japan, covering 9 different training topics, equipping 132 missionaries and 105 Japanese (44% of the total). 237 Leaders Served! (This does not include the well over 100 who were involved in CPI endorsed seminars.) Some of the training topics that have been covered this year are Catching God’s Vision, Building Community through Small Groups, Clarifying your Ministry Core Values, Personal and Church-based Evangelism, Spiritual Formation and Gospel Renewal, The Missional Church, Church Planting Networks, Kingdom Prayer, and the Purpose-driven Church.
At the upcoming CPI National Conference (November 6-9, 2007) where we are increasing the number of training teams to 16 and also offering more training targeted for both Japanese and missionary mobilizers. Please continue to pray for the preparations for this November’s national conference. Ask God to empower the new trainers and training teams. After the National Conference in November we will again scatter these training teams to further equip church planters all over Japan.
Our CPI vision is “mentoring leaders to become part of a movement that is multiplying churches.” We hope one day that those in (and even without) CPI will be not counting how many all beef patties are on a sesame bun, but rather our dream is to be able to count the number of disciples, leaders, and churches that God will bring as a result of the ministry of these equipped frontline workers, for His Glory.
John and Elaine Mehn
July 2007
McDonalds Japanese Style
- One McDonalds in Japan is an exact replica of one of the original restaurants.
- Currently for sale at McDonalds in Japan: The Mega-Teriyaki Burger.
- There are more McDonalds’ restaurants in Japan than in any country besides the US.
P.S. We need some volunteers to help us with this conference. If you are interested contact us or the BGC Home Office. Information is at www.JCPI.Net.
