Church planting movements have sparked considerable debate since they emerged at the dawn of Christianity’s third millennium. Some have viewed them as a Great Commission panacea, while others have dismissed them as illusory at best or sinister at worst.

If we pull back the curtain on church planting movements, what do we find? Does this phenomenon prove to be a grand deception, akin to Dorothy’s discovery when she peeked behind the curtain in Oz? Or is it as real as the wheat fields of Kansas?

The new book, Inside Church Planting Movements: What 25 Years of Assessments Reveal, addresses these questions: Are church planting movements real? If so, how do we know? How do we know when church multiplication has occurred? Can we trust what has been reported? And, if not, why not? How can we assess the quality and quantity of the work being reported? Can we really discern the truth from potential deception?

The research in this new book draws from dozens of sources. Chief among these is the extensive data found in the archives of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board (IMB). Between 1998 and 2022, the IMB collected thousands of pages of research from 28 onsite investigations of reported church planting movements in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This valuable trove of information has been inaccessible to the outside world—until now.

Just as important as the movements themselves are how they were assessed. Accordingly, much of this book focuses on “how we know what we know.” Only as we learn how God is at work in these movements can we hope to clarify our own roles within them.

Wherever possible, the actual names and locations of these movements have been retained. However, many of the movements occur in countries where rapid Christian growth remains imperiled. Those familiar with ministry among the world’s least evangelized will understand the necessity of obscuring details in these security-sensitive contexts. In all cases, however, the facts and events recorded in this book are accurate to the best of my knowledge and ability.

Global Scope

Rather than cherry-picking movement assessments that predetermine positive results, this book covers every movement assessment retained in the International Mission Board’s archives. The book provides a summary of 28 reported movements and the assessments that followed. They cover a range of reports from East and South Asia, the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas. The findings were anything but uniform.

Of the 28 movements, 11 were found to be clear and unassailable, often discovering that the scope and integrity of the movements far exceeded what the missionary had initially reported. Eleven reported movements proved to be something less than or different from the clear definition of a movement. Perhaps most intriguing were the six movement assessments that revealed something in between. These were multiplying church plants that, the assessors determined, had yet to reach a tipping point that would indicate they had cascaded into “rapidly multiplying indigenous churches planting churches that sweep through a people group or population segment.”

Security Sensitivities

Though many of the assessed movements took place in countries that remain hostile to missionary work and accordingly required obscuring their locations, the details for each one are reported with candor and accuracy, verified by the IMB’s Global Research Department before going to press. These archival reports cover movements among Muslims, Hindus, Communist atheists, rural villagers, and urban dwellers. The reader will have no difficulty deciphering the context of each movement and gaining missiological insights into how these movements emerged and the dynamics each encountered.

Critics and Catalysts

An entire chapter is dedicated to the principal objections to movements’ missiology that are circulating in the Christian world today. I describe these criticisms without attempting a defensive rebuttal. Instead, I invite readers to examine the evidence for themselves, from the actual on-site assessments, and draw their own conclusions.

The book also provides a biographical history of movement missiology, relating the earliest and most prolific champions of movements from both Western and non-Western provenance. The presentation of movements themselves is treated historically, from the earliest assessed movements in 2000 to the most recent in 2022.

Practical Tools

Some readers have seen particular value in the transparent presentation of the assessment process. Each assessment includes the names of those who conducted the on-site survey. Readers also receive a step-by-step process for conducting their own movement assessment, and new assessment tools that have appeared over the past decade. These include online tracking tools such as “Pattern” (patternlaunch.com) and “GAPP” (Gospel to All Peoples and Places — taethni.com/gapp).

What Others Are Saying

Warrick Farah, editor of Motus Dei: The Movement of God to Disciple the Nations, wrote: “Only David Garrison could distill thousands of pages of reports into a compelling story!” Dr. David Singh, director of PhD studies at the Oxford Center for Mission Studies, confided, “Having sat on the fence for years and imperiously granted a certain ‘phenomenological being’ to the reports of movements (including those emanating from my own country of birth), I found the author’s honest scrutiny of CPM’s reality, his evaluation of its critics/catalysts, and his concise assessment of specific movements, refreshingly persuasive.” Samford University’s Chair of Christian Ministry, J.D. Payne, wrote: “Inside Church Planting Movements is the book we have been waiting for—a must-read for those interested in contemporary movements of the Spirit!”

Are movements real? Yes. Are there deceptions? Also, yes. Inside Church Planting Movements is not a promotional book about movements, but an invitation for Christians to find out for themselves—not with presuppositional biases for or against movements, but with a keen eye and a curious mind that seeks to discover the truth.

For too long, many sincere Christians have been on the outside of movements, left to their own imaginations to determine whether these movements were real, or, as one critic opined, “sinister.” For the first time, concerned Christians are invited behind the curtain to see for themselves.