I always thought the church has to do something with people. I mean people come to faith in Christ and have then fellowship together growing into a community, learning, sharing and suffering together on their journey. Over the years I have seen and been in different churches and communities. I believe there are many ways to do it and actually I come to believe that there is no right ways. Because we people are so different.
I thought that the model to put up a building in a village and then call it church planting was something from past attempts to do "missions". There are no Christians or a pastor in the village but a building has to be put up. Some sort of a proof to the mission board of successful work. We already have one of those "churches" in Hui Kau Laam (on the hill) and now some Missionary wants to put a building up in another village where we labored fore the last year. I don’t understand this approach. It has absolutely nothing to do with the great commission, or am I missing something? Most of the villages we work in our places where Evangelists and Pastors tried in the last 10 years and failed and I think it is partly because of this kind of understanding of planting churches.
In the bigger Lahu villages (500 people or more) A trend for new church plants and church splits occurs. In one of the villages we worked early on with about 60 houses there are 4 churches now. Two Baptist, a Catholic and some other one. When we did our first project 6 years ago there was only one Baptist church there. Unfortunately the neighboring village is still unreached. I am not against new churches in a village. It just seems to me a bit odd the way things develop. There are still unreached villages that surely could use a little effort in that area. This is why we mainly try work in villages where no one wants or can’t go.