ATLANTA -- Successful church-planting projects among various ethnic groups will take more than the ability to speak a different language, according to one researcher.
Curt Watke, a church-planting researcher with the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board, said outreach ministers must develop churches based on a group's culture, values and attitudes. Watke refers to the approach as "neotribal," according to the Baptist Press.
"We began to understand (during various research efforts) that in order for us to move this forward, we are ultimately going to have to create people group profiles," Watke said. "We differentiate based on culture. We connect ministry programming in context, helping us determine which ministry approaches to use."
Watke's research on how different groups respond to the gospel and how to best approach planting indigenous churches among them will be posted later this month on www.churchplantingvillage.net.
"This research said that what we have to do is we have to be able to help people identify groups of people that are culturally similar, map them so we know where they are, identify where we need churches planted among them, go out and talk to them, index our learnings, and network people so they can learn from each other," Watke said.
