NewThing Movement System | M4 Europe Collaboration

Matt Millar

Global Operations Director

For many years, NewThing has been friends with the leaders of an organization based in Europe called M4 Europe (https://m4europe.org/). Over the last twelve months, we’ve been working intentionally on developing a strategic partnership that, we believe, will have tremendous Kingdom impact.

M4 has trained over four hundred and fifty church planting teams in the fifteen plus years of their existence and this has happened across fifteen European nations. Each nation has a group of local, indigenous leaders who have been trained to equip the local church planting teams within their cities and countries. As an organization, they have done an incredible job providing contextualized coaching and training of church planting teams throughout Europe so that those teams can plant relevant, multiplying communities of faith.

M4 realized that many of these church plants were struggling to send out other church planting teams to begin reaching new neighborhoods after planting their first church. As NewThing has ventured into the European context more and more, we’ve realized the importance of having training for church planting teams - something we have not historically done.

In other words, where M4 helps teams to plant their first church, NewThing helps established churches to reproduce at every level in order to multiply new churches. The complementary nature of the focus of our organizations is a good starting point, however, it is the chemistry and alignment of our values and modes of operating that has made this partnership possible. Collectively, we both hold a high value on relationships, contextualization, learning communities, decentralization as well as a Kingdom first mentality - among other things.

Over the course of the next six to twelve months we will be trialing NewThing Movement System trainings around Europe with churches who have gone through the M4 training process. Our first scheduled collaboration is in Sweden in November of this year. The hope is that these churches will begin to reproduce new disciples, leaders, and communities of faith that will continue to multiply beyond that.

NewThing is about catalyzing movements and the collaboration of the Body of Christ globally. As an organization, we do our best to live out what we are teaching and this partnership with M4 is one way we are continuing to try to align what we do with what we believe.