Seven Lessons from Stan Parks
Stan Parks has been a learner and catalyst, serving movements for thirty years. He’s seen multiplying movements of disciples and churches emerge among unreached people groups of South East Asia. Now he serves movement pioneers all over the world.
Stan packed a lot of learning into a thirty-minute interview. I went over the transcript and counted about thirty of them. Here’s my top seven:
1. God prepares us.
My parents were missionaries in Indonesia. They did some interesting things that were against the grain so I learned a lot of the principles from them. Then when I was in high school and college in the 1980s my dad was at the IMB and he helped put together this effort in which Bill and Susan Smith and Dave and Jan Watson and Curtis and Debbie Sargent and David Garrison and other folks tried crazy stuff. A lot of what they tried laid the groundwork for seeing many movements. I would come home from my summer construction job and they’d tell me some crazy story of what Bill Smith had done recently. So I began to hear about movements and learning from their stories.
2. Bring people together, sell the problem and find a solution everyone owns.
My wife and I went to Indonesia in 1994. I was doing computer work. I soon got involved in an effort to identify the Unreached People Groups (UPGs) of Indonesia. David Barrett estimated there were around 7,000 of them. We brought together 400 Indonesian leaders and about fifty expats. We put up a list of 127 unreached people groups with over 100 that had zero workers, and many that had zero believers, zero churches. There was a stunned silence, then we all turned to God in prayer confessing our neglect of the task. People knew there were unreached people groups, but they hadn’t realised the magnitude of the task. Now we knew there were 150 million Indonesians in UPGs. That created the groundswell among the Indonesians—we’ve got to send people! Within five years over 100 of the UPGs had workers among them.
3. The foreigner is not the solution.
We knew the Indonesians were the key. Indonesia has a significant number of Christians. Some people groups in the East are majority Christian. Many Chinese-Indonesians are Christian. There was a move of God back in the 1960s in on the island of Java and there are millions of believers there. These Indonesian disciples were the ones who would reach their nation. They were just one step away culturally from the UPGs. They can go where we can’t. Our job was to serve them as partners.
4. Identify the blockages.
Around 2007 we realised that many workers among the unreached groups were reproducing a Western style of church. That’s the model they knew. They learned Christianity from Americans or Dutch or Australians and they copied a Western form of church. We gave them our culture along with the gospel and it wasn’t working.
5. Learn from other fields.
About that time we heard of movements starting in other places. So we invited Victor John from the Bhojpuri movement in India, and David Garrison a mobilizer and researcher of movements. David presented on the principles behind movements. Victor presented on what it is actually like to be in the middle of a multiplying movement.
The Indonesians said, “This can’t happen in Indonesia. We’re a Muslim country. Victor replied, “We were the graveyard of modern missions for 100 years. They said it can’t happen here! But God chose the holiest part of India to be the source of a movement. It can happen.”
I didn’t give up. I sought out others who God had used to spark movements — David Watson, Victor John, Bill Smith, Steve Smith. I sat with them and learned, others did the same and then we applied the learning.
6. God prepared us, then he brought the breakthrough.
The tsunami in Aceh was a key breaking point in Indonesia. The Indonesian prayer movement that grew up in the 1990s was praying for the UPGs. The day before the tsunami happened they had a large prayer gathering in different locations. One of the key things they prayed was that God would open up the province of Aceh.
Aceh had closed down due to the imposition of Sharia law and civil war. They expelled almost everybody trying to share the gospel. Then the tsunami hit on December 26, 2004 and devastated Aceh.
After the tsunami a lot of people went to Aceh, some for a few weeks at a time, some moved up there. They had learned from movements in other parts of the world, they followed Jesus’ pattern of when he sent out the 70 disciples looking for households of peace.
The impact rippled through gospel workers all across Indonesia, but even before we began to see any fruit among the lost our lives had begun to change. We began to focus on obedience-based discipleship, not knowledge-based discipleship. We prayed more seriously than ever before. We knew who we were looking for. We were asking — is this a person of peace, are their family and friends open?
The workers sat down with locals in groups, not just individuals, and searched the Scriptures together. They didn’t teach but allowed people to discuss and think and ultimately come to faith in Christ.
It was dangerous for the workers, it could have cost their lives, but they were full of faith. Healings and miracles shocked some communities who then wanted to study the Injil — the Gospels — and learn about Issa — Jesus.
Some radical religious leaders confessed they had been fighting this movement like Saul. One said, “There’s no way God can forgive what I’ve done.” The Indonesian worker said, “Brother, God can forgive you.”
The workers persevered despite the risks and churches began to emerge that looked a lot more like Acts 2 than a traditional Western church. Most were first generation believers, they knew what it is to be rescued from darkness.
7. Take it to the world.
As we saw streams of reproducing disciples and churches in Indonesia, I began to help other networks and agencies around the world — South Asia, Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia. In Indonesia I was a Barnabas to the Pauls. Now I was becoming a Barnabas to other Barnabases all of whom had their Pauls!
God connected us with Steve and Laura Smith and we began to look at the spread of multiplying movements globally. In 2010 we could identify eighty movements around the world. In 2017 we identified 550 movements.
God is doing an unprecedented move around the world. Never in history have we seen movements on every continent, in every religious sphere. Today the number of identified movements is over 1,370. The total number of people in movements is about 80 million — that’s about 1% of the world’s population. That’s astounding!
Jesus said, This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations (ethne), and then the end will come. (Matt 24:14).
We don’t know when the end will come, but we know it will not come until every people group (ethne) has heard the gospel. Jesus commanded us to disciple every people group. What will it take? What about a city that has 400 different people groups? So we decided to go for every people group and every place.
It is a global movement. God is the one building his church all over the world.
The key to starting movements in an unreached people and place is to get behind the existing movements and help them start movements. Over 80% of movements were started by other movements. Once you know how to start a movement you can go to a neighboring people group and you know what to do.
That why I’m part of 24:14, a global network of movements and agencies who want to see movements in every language and every place.
