This is part one of a series exploring the partnership between prayer and Disciple Making Movements (DMM) or Church Planting Movements (CPM).

The question of how to unite the efforts of prayer and church planting has been a growing one, by both people whose gifting is in prayer/intersession and those who have thrown themselves into church planting ministries. Prayer and evangelism can be wonderfully partnered together to increase the effectiveness of both.

Over the next few web posts I hope to talk about ways that through prayer we can see a Church Planting Movement (CPM) emerge in North Africa. For those who don’t know, a CPM is generally considered to have started where groups are consistently reproducing to the fourth generation** and churches are forming.

CPMs used to be considered “only something that happens in China.” And I often hear statements like “well, everything works in Bangladesh” but now they are on every continent, and even in our own region.

It should be noted at the very beginning that CPMs are a sovereign work of God. It should also be stated that anyone I’ve ever met involved in seeing a CPM start have been people of immense prayer. It is a common statement in DMM*** that “A prayer movement must proceed a church planting movement.”

The DMM worker prays that God will lead them to a person of peace or PoP (Luke 9, Luke 10, Matthew 10, Mark 6), they pray that the PoP will open their Oikos (family, friends, circle of influence) to studying the Scriptures with the DMMer, they pray that God would illuminate His Scriptures and that the Oikos would obey and share it with others.

None of these ideas work without prayer. There has to be a real change in the DMMers prayer life, a need to spend time with God, to hear His voice and His plans for the people of this country. It’s a daunting task to increase personal prayer time but try starting by increasing it by 10 mins a day.

Recently I met the man who wrote “Any Three.” He has been involved in starting a large CPM in South East Asia. He said that before the CPM started they were praying what he called “honest, ugly prayers” for up to 3 hours a day. He was beseeching God because he said “it wasn’t right that [their target group] was going to hell.” This was a man who had acronym for everything and strategy and plan for every situation but it was prayer (not without action) that was the key component to them finding their initial people of peace.

Please join us and start praying that workers across North Africa will find People of Peace. Those who are genuinely seeking to find God and who are willing to do that seeking together with their circle of family and friends. Pray for groups to start emerging who will study God’s word together. Pray for workers who are seeking to develop their prayer life further – spending more time praying fervently and desperately for God to move across North Africa.

*CPM – a church planing movement
**Forth generation – a group is started, first-generation, that starts another group, Second generation, that starts a group, etc etc
***DMM – for the sake of these articles I have used the term DMM – Disciple Making Movement – as a methodology that ideally produces a CPM as the end goal but these terms are often used interchangeably.

We recommend reading a book called Miraculous Movements by Jerry Trousedale. It will build your faith and help inspire your prayers for North Africa.

Part 2 coming tomorrow!