Building God's household: Issues of contextual church planting in Taiwan

The research goal of this study is to describe the key issues of developing a contextual church planting theory for Taiwan's evangelical churches. The phenomena of Taiwan's contemporary church planting movement have been delineated through conducting two field research projects. Certain findings of contextual issues related to new church development in Taiwan's context have been reported and evaluated. Based on these findings, this study suggests Taiwan's churches must equip their church planters with three kinds of disciplines that will facilitate Taiwan's churches to effectively develop more healthy and growing churches. First, Taiwan's churches have to equip their church planters with ecclesiological understanding of the true nature of the church as God's household so that the envisioning churches will become missional churches for expanding his kingdom. Second, Taiwan's church planters have to recognize key characteristics of healthy and growing churches and to learn church growth principles to develop new churches that will have high potential of reproducibility. Third, Taiwan's churches have to learn the principles of effective church planting. A theoretical model of developing healthy and growing churches has been presented to facilitate Taiwan's churches to get a comprehensive and thorough knowledge of developing new churches.