Recently the North American Mission Board shared good news that Southern Baptist church plants were up 5 percent in 2014. We still have a lot of catching up to do because our church planting efforts lost pace with population growth decades ago, but hopefully last year's increase will begin a new trend.
In addition to starting more churches, we must pay close attention to the health of these new congregations. Do they have staying power? Are they reaching people for Christ? Do they give to missions causes? In short, are they having an impact? We cannot and will not sacrifice quality for the sake of quantity.
At NAMB we started monitoring Southern Baptist church plants much more carefully beginning with the Class of 2010. We are continuing to improve this process, but we already know a lot more than we did a few years ago.
As a reminder, the church planting class of 2010 started with 943 church plants. We pull our data from the Annual Church Profile (ACP) so we can make comparisons to the broader report that includes all Southern Baptist churches. The most recent ACP year for which these details are available is 2013, so that's the data we are using. Keep reading
How does your denomination or network measure the success of its church plants?Photo credit: Pixabay, public domain
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