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History of Cityteam's Disciple-Making in North America
Disciple-Making in North America is not a new thing for Cityteam. Brief forays into church planting began in the early 1980’s when several churches were started in the San Francisco Bay area with refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. In 1985 the Church Advancement Team was established as a division of CityTeam with a mandate to help launch and grow churches targeting the poor and ethnic communities of San Jose. Although one church was trained and coached through growth from eighty-seven congregants to five hundred, the team disbanded within a few years as team members pursued other ministry. In 1994 Cityteam engaged again in church planting in San Jose resulting in the establishment of New Generations Church, a cell model that grew in its first five years to a congregation of about six hundred, almost all new converts from depressed communities. A few other congregations were started and then the church planting ministry plateaued in terms of numerical growth.
For the next few years the church planting “vision” lay largely obscured again as other ministry activities took center stage. But God continued to work and by the early part of 2000 the leadership team, dissatisfied with the current ministry results embarked upon a review of ministry that led to the conclusion that the “making of disciples” part of the mission statement had been largely missed. The culmination of all this introspection and self-evaluation came at a leadership retreat in 2003 where after studying Jim Collins’ Good to Great the team wrote this hedgehog statement: “We can be best at catalyzing self-replicating discipleship groups among the poor and disadvantaged.” In an executive planning session in January of 2004 the new direction for CityTeam was articulated clearly in this Overall Objective: “To catalyze at least seventy-five church planting movements among the poor in the current fifteen established regions of influence within the next three to five years.”
Over the next several years, Cityteam bases in North America began to incorporate Disciple-Making into the ministry in their cities. Re-starts became common as they were learning, experimenting and confronting numerous challenges but they continued to move forward gradually gaining some traction. A significant number of groups had emerged by early 2010 growing to more than 200 by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the international side of Cityteam, after pursuing ministry partnerships in the mid- and late 1990’s that did not produce the intended results re-formed as NewGenerations International with a Disciple-Making intent. Africa became the primary focus where since 2003 several church planting movements emerged with over 15,000 new churches providing the experience and vision for a much broader Disciple-Making ministry throughout the world.
By 2009, the leadership team felt that enough experience had been gained both in the fledgling incorporation of CPM into existing Cityteam programs in North America and in the exploding Disciple-Making ministries in Africa that it was time to launch a broader initiative for Disciple-Making throughout North America.
During 2010 assessments were made of existing Disciple-Making progress in North America with course corrections made and additional emphasis given by the Cityteam domestic leadership to Disciple-Making. Also considerable effort was made to understand the current state of church planting in North America and to gain some initial potential partners for a broaderDisciple-Making effort. This has resulted in a growing focus of Cityteam’s efforts in North America on disciple-making that leads to church planting so that within the past few years more than 400 groups have begun; approximately 50 have now emerged as churches. Additionally, Cityteam has been able to be the catalyst for by Disciple-Making providing training and coaching to at least fifty other nationwide and local organizations and churches.
