Reproducible Pastoral Training - A Book Review

Reproducible Pastoral Training: Church Planting Guidelines from the Teachings of George Patterson by Patrick O’Connor is a book about missions. However, its insights are also helpful to anyone who is either starting a church or seeking to see it grow. Patrick O’Connor dives into the wisdom of George Patterson and presents it in an intelligent way.

Various topics are explained in the text. How does one reach a culture with the Gospel of Jesus Christ? What is better, door-to-door evangelism or another technique? Is it best to begin with a multi-cultural church or to start with one culture? How does one utilize contacts for the sake of the Gospel? Also, how does one prevent establishing a foreign church rather than a native one? Furthermore, the author goes into issues like how leaders are trained and when they should begin serving.

I found myself revisiting preconceived notions of what is done in Western churches and thus is considered to be biblical. For instance, the distance between the time someone accepts Christ and is baptized. This and many more ideas of how to start, run and develop a church are tackled in this volume.

I would recommend this book to missionary candidates and pastors alike. Board members would be challenged to think more biblically as a result of reading it. Perhaps someday we will see the impact this book has on missions and pastoral ministry.

An interesting aside to this review was that our church had missionaries come and about 10 years prior, one of them had met the author and was told by him he would write a book and this was it. I felt led by the Lord to give him my copy. Isn't that great!

This book was given to me free of charge in exchange for a review. Visit www.missionfrontiers.org for similar offers and great content on missions in today's world.