The Fellowship of Church Planters actually began when Jim Frost, from the Cranston Christian Fellowship, and Dick Scoggins, from the Warwick Christian Fellowship, were commissioned to work as a team to effect church planting in 1985. The first church planted by this team effort was the Cumberland Christian Fellowship (Now the Lincoln Christian Fellowship, LCF). FCP has started the LCF (1986), the Chepachet Christian House Church (1987), the East Providence Fellowship of House Churches (1988), and the Northwest Fellowship of HC's (1991), West Bay Fellowship of House Churches (1999).

We have focused on urban models for effective church planting and reproduction. We are developing house churches, which will be relationally networked together into fellowships (consisting of from 2 to 6 house churches), for support and edification.

We desire to ally with other church planting teams as well as promote relationships between churches and teams which will enable greater sharing of resources in the goal of establishing reproducing networks of house churches. By "house church", we mean the church meeting as a family. Our house churches meet in storefronts and business offices as well as in homes. They fellowship, often monthly, in large groups involving numbers of congregations in addition to their family meetings. The house church model gives us great flexibility to work with different people groups. As a result we have been able to work with some immigrant groups (most notably Hungarians and Hispanics, and Muslims) who do not speak good English. Our hope is to eventually learn how to develop them into house churches, which can then interface with HC fellowships for strength and stability.

Our formal relationships with other Networks of Church Planting Teams and churches, presently (2005) Immerge, Impact Network, and M-28 in addition to FCP, is an expression of kind of networking at every level that we feel is in keeping with Biblical principles that Paul used with his network(s) of teams.

Next   Main