Academy for Church PLanting
The Academy for Church Planting and Leadership is a training institute that produces Christian men and women trained to be church planters and leaders in South Asia. The institution on an academic level integrates the Bible (special revelation) with science, commerce and arts (general revelation) to bring about an enhanced understanding of God’s purpose for man the way he intended it to be. The graduates of ACPL are mainly church planters and mission leaders. In recent times, a strong emphasis is being laid on encountering cultural, social, political and other mission challenges with the use of sound empirical research.
ACPL is accredited by the Indian Institute of Missiology (IIM) and is also a member body of the Asian Theological Association (ATA).
For more details pertaining to these programs, please visit www.a4cpl.org
Certified Programs
In addition to the training of church planters and leaders with academically accredited and certified programs through ACPL, we provide training at extension centers to grass roots church planters and leaders. Grass root level training is crucial to church planting and leadership development in the context of South Asia for the following reasons:
- Not many graduates of accredited and certified programs actually work in the grass root level.
- Grass root level pockets the largest category of unreached peoples in the region.
- Contextualizing training materials relevant to region is a big task that needs to be pursued.
- Church planters and potential leaders for the grass root level can be relocated temporarily to an urban center for training because of the high cost of relocation and the unwillingness to leave familiar culture.
- Since most grass root level workers are agrarians, moving them outside of their agricultural land will severely affect harvesting of crops.
Indigenous Reproductive Church Planting
In pursuance of REAP’s heavy emphasis on “Indigenous Reproductive Church Planting,” ACPL (Academy of Church Planing and Leadership) launched the Diploma program in February 2013. The ‘Diploma in Church Planting’ program is offered to grass-roots level church planters and leaders. It is intended to provide strategic focus on reproductive church planting.
Students graduating with this program will be able to plant indigenous (self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing) churches themselves or be involved in the revitalization and/or rejuvenation of their existing churches. This program is most beneficial to those applicants with a clear “call” to church planting, spouses of “called” church planters and other lay leaders who have a burden to stimulate their churches into becoming indigenous and reproductive.
Training Needs
We envision a minimum of 36 months for an indigenous reproductive church to be planted. For this to be implemented successfully, our training is distributed over the same period of time. Previously, we trained and then deployed the church planters. From the feedback we have received from the church planters and their supervisors, we have decided to adopt the distributed training model.
While this has increased our cost, it has also reduced the quantum of time taken to plant a church. In addition, it has facilitated periodic research and ensured developments as a result of our research findings.
Training costs us $1800 per person per batch. In every batch, we conduct 6 training events spread over 36 months. Each training event is 2 weeks in duration. We bring experts in their respective fields to train our church planters. There is an interval of 6-7 months between each training event, during which the church planters experiment their learning. In the very first phase of training, we introduce our ministry philosophy, particularly our drive towards indigeneity and reproductivity. A monthly support of $50 for a period of 36 months will help us meet the training costs of one church planter.
Every year, our target is to train 150 church planters in South Asia. Accordingly, our annual training budget is $90,000. Perhaps, the Lord leads you to support this endeavor and if you would like to know more about our training events, please contact us at info@reapindia.church.
To send us your support, please make your contribution in favor of REAP International Inc. and mail it to
PO Box 10484, Knoxville, TN or give right here by clicking the link below.
