Review of Dan Sinclair's Vision of the Possible

My next two posts will be a review of Dan Sinclair's approach to church planting, and since he interacts with David Garrison's CPM approach, tomorrow I'll observe how Sinclair and Garrison compare and contrast. Back in 2009, I posted on my blog an entry entitled, “Teaming101.”  In that post, I referenced Dan Sinclair’s A Vision of the Possible: Pioneer Church Planting in Teams and mentioned 10 good teaming questions from his book. I want to expand my observations about Sinclair’s book to include his philosophy and missiology, and let me say from the outset that I think every church planter or churches even considering the idea of planting another church should read this book.

             Dan Sinclair takes a direct approach to providing a guidebook for planting new churches with team methods in pioneer areas among unreached people groups. He carefully balances these three components, namely church planting, team, and the unreached, as key parts to his book’s thesis. Sinclair believes it is best to use teams to plant churches in pioneer areas. Although his book is written from the perspective of one having served in Muslim contexts, much of his information is transferable to non-pioneer fields as well. The book has fourteen chapters, each dealing with various aspects of church planting. Not creating an exhaustive list by any means, Sinclair has chosen the top issues that pioneer church planters confront when working on teams.

            He begins his discourse with a defense of the ongoing debate about the term apostle. According to Sinclair, apostleship has been a greatly “neglected subject” (p. 1). He believes an apostolic ministry is necessary for ongoing church planting. Therefore, he advocates that each church planting team have at least one team leader with some apostolic gifting (p. 11).

            He then moves into ecclesiology in chapter two. He defends the house church model as normative and promotes a plurality of elders for local church polity. His writing then turns from theory to practice with a discussion of the components necessary for a healthy church.

            As a supervisor of over 160 teams, Sinclair devotes chapters three and four to defining a rationale for the team approach and practical advice for maintaining a healthy effective team. He explains the importance of a Vision and Strategy Paper (VSP), which is a master plan or guide for the team’s strategic direction, and the Memo of Understanding (MOU) or team covenant. He advocates strong biblical leadership on the team but also defends a participative environment.

            Chapter five outlines the seven church planting phases developed by Dick Scoggins in Rhode Island as a useful communicative and evaluative tool. Phase I is pre-field training. Phase II is language and cultural acquisition. Phase III is personal evangelism. Phase IV is discipleship. Phase V is gathering. Phase VI is leadership development. Phase VII is reproduction. At first glance the phasing might seem like a linear approach, but Sinclair explains that “it is very common for ministry activities from various phases to be going on at the same time” (p. 60).

            He devotes chapter six to language acquisition. Interestingly, he advocates a language acquisition structure of two to three years committed to fulltime language study. Although he admits this might require adjustment in other scenarios, his “rule of thumb is thirty or more hours per week engaged in language activities for two years” (p. 102).

           Chapter seven is about platforms. Initially he deals with the ethics hurdle of doing covert missions operations, but he quickly moves into a definition of platforming. By deduction, it could be argued that both language acquisition and platforming make up phase II of the church planting phases.

            Sinclair says that “church planting is the main theme of this book” (p. 117). Accordingly, he defends personal evangelism as the central means to do so. He discusses evangelism methods that might work in resistant fields and recommends the “Discovery Course” for Muslim fields (p. 129). Although he is not in opposition to friendship evangelism, he nonetheless notes a demarcation between friendship evangelism and apostolic evangelism (p. 132). It is this apostolic evangelism that makes up phase III for church planting.

            Logically, Sinclair moves from evangelism to discipleship, phase IV in the phasing process. In chapter nine, he gives some very practical steps for hands-on discipleship. He also warns of potential pitfalls in a Muslim context.

            From discipleship he moves to phase V, leadership development that is characterized by servanthood. Team leaders are to be spiritually healthy, men or women of vision and faith, personally involved in church planting, able to listen to their team members, able to oversee individuals, and able to model accountability. Sinclair does a great job differentiating between essential and non-essential tasks of a team leader in this chapter. However, his shift in focus to the apostolic team itself is marked as he omits any mention of leadership development among nationals, perhaps what one would expect for phase V in church planting. Chapter eleven, nonetheless, does discuss the installation of elders and the timely withdrawal of foreign influence; so the shift in focus can be overlooked.

            Chapter twelve is Sinclair’s interaction with David Garrison’s statistics in Church Planting Movements. Click here for my review of Garrison’sbook. 

Sinclair adds supplemental information to Garrison’s materials in this chapter. Although much of the material overlaps, there are some dissimilarities in Sinclair’s own observations from four case studies in 2003. For example, he differs with one of Garrison’s conclusions regarding the financial support of national church leaders. Whereas Garrison promotes the POUCH approach marked by unpaid lay workers, Sinclair says this lack of financial support would make his church leaders “unable to be much involved in concerted expansion work” (p. 207).

            Sinclair defines the traditional, cell, and house church models in chapter thirteen, and then he lists some advantages and disadvantages for each. He denies that any one model is superior to the others, but he does hint at his preference for house church.

            His final chapter returns to the ecclesiological issue of multiple elder polity. In a question and answer format, Sinclair attempts to define the role of the church planter in elder installation and support. This chapter in conjunction with the epilogue places a premium on biblical teaching as the key element of church planting ministry.