HISTORY

In the late 1980s, WIGTake?, or What’s it going to take? became the ethos watchword for the pioneering breakthrough into the 10/40 Window by missionaries serving with the Southern Baptist International Mission Board. The piercing question, What’s it going to take?, referred to the fulfillment of the Great Commission. Rather than asking the more common question, “What can I do?” This loftier, more strategic, question sought to view the Great Commission challenge from God’s vantage point. If this is God’s mission, then what are the resources and means that he offers to fulfill his mandate and complete the unfinished task of completing the Great Commission in our lifetime?

In the years that followed, a new type of missionary, initially called “Non-Residential Missionaries, began deploying to the world’s least-reached people groups, even if these missionaries were unable to reside among their engaged peoples. In 1990, MARC, the research division of World Vision, published Dr. David Garrison’s seminal work on the subject, The Nonresidential Missionary.

By 1996, these same missionaries were seeing the first Church Planting Movements emerge in Cambodia, India, China, and Cuba. “Church Planting Movements” was the term coined by these missionaries to describe the phenomenon of rapidly multiplying indigenous churches planting churches that swept through a people group or population segment. Like Donald McGavran’s “People Movements,” Church Planting Movements described ethnolinguistic community conversions, but unlike McGavran’s People Movements, Church Planting Movements described the multiplication of churches, and not just societal conversions to the Christian religion.

In 1997, Dr. David Garrison surveyed these prolific movements and described four of these movements in a 57-page booklet titled Church Planting Movements. Over the next few years, this modest booklet was translated into more than 40 languages, offering a vision of indigenous church multiplication that resonated throughout the Christian missional world.

The little booklet was followed in 2004 by a larger book by Garrison describing some 25 different movements on every inhabited continent. Searching for a publisher proved more daunting than describing the movements themselves. So, in 2004, with funds set aside from the sale of their home, David and Sonia Garrison formed WIGTake Resources and published, as their first book, the 329-page Church Planting Movements: How God is Redeeming a Lost World. The book introduced the Christian world to an emerging phenomenon that would soon capture the attention of the missional world. By 2010, Church Planting Movements had been translated into 20 languages, and followed by a number of related books, dissertations, and scholarly articles.

Today, WIGTake Resources is one of the premier Christian publishing houses for books and resources related to church-planting movements. Internationally renowned authors include: Kevin Greeson, Steve Smith, Doug Lucas, Ying Kai, Chris Clayman, Victor John, Dave Coles, and Mike Shipman. Books published by WIGTake Resources circulate in nearly two-dozen languages around the world.