By Robin G. Jordan
Since the 1980s I have been involved in a number of church plants at various stages in the life of the new congregation. One I was involved from the planning stage on. The others I became involved fairly early in their life. Since the 1980s I have also attended seminars and workshops as well as done extensive reading in the literature on church planting. While I do not claim to be an expert in the field, I do believe that I have acquired valuable information that might benefit others who are planning a church plant or in the midst of planting a new church.
Just as the North American mission field has changed over the past five decades so has church planting. What worked in the 1980s may not work today. At the same time the underlying principles may still prove useful. We can also learn from the mistakes that were made in the past, as well those being made in the present day.
In this article I am going to look at four different models of church planting with which I have some familiarity and a number of advantages and disadvantages associated with these models.
The first model is the “hiving off” model. This model has several variations. One variation is the described on the
Reformed Church in America’s Church Mutiplication website:
A large congregation (300 or more members) hires a planter for about nine months. The planter gathers a group from within the congregation with which to plant a new church, usually in the same area. Groups range from 30 to more than 200 people.
A second variation is that the judicatory (conference diocese, district, synod, etc.) hires a church planter who gathers a group from the congregations of churches of the same denomination in a particular area. With this group the planter starts a new church. This was the method that was used to plant North Cross United Methodist Church in Madisonville, Louisiana in the first decade of this century. The bishop of the Louisiana's UMC Conference recruited the youth pastor of a church in Baton Rouge, who enjoyed a good reputation as a preacher, to plant a new UMC church in a growing area of western St. Tammany Parish.
A third variation is the one which was used to plant St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Mandeville, Louisiana in the late 1980s. The new church was a joint initiative of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana and Christ Episcopal Church in Covington, Louisiana. The rector of Christ Church had some experience in pioneering a new congregation. He gathered a group from within Christ Church’s congregation. The new congregation was organized as a satellite congregation of Christ Church at a public interest meeting to which members of the community in Mandeville who were interested in pioneering a new church were invited to attend. The new congregation began with a nucleus of 40 odd people. The rector and assistant rector of Christ Church and the canon for missions of the Diocese took turns officiating at its services. Within 6 months the new congregation had applied to the Diocese for recognition as a mission of the Diocese. A vicar was appointed. Within a decade St. Michael’s had become a self-supporting parish.
A fourth variation is also a variation of the multsite approach to church planting. The
RCA’s Church Multiplication website offers the following description of the multisite approach.
A parent church starts a congregation at a new location in the same region. It remains under the leadership of the parent church long-term.
Rather than starting anew congregation from scratch the parent church may “hive off” a part of the congregation whose members live in the community where the second campus is to be located and use them as the nucleus of the new congregation. This is the approach that the Journey Church in Murray, Kentucky took when it opened a second campus in Benton, a community eighteen miles to the north of Murray and from which it drew a part of its congregation. A number of attendees of the Journey Church from Benton had expressed an interest in a second campus in Benton, principally because, while they really liked the Journey Church, the drive from Benton to Murray often took 30 minutes or more due to the traffic lights, poor weather, and hazardous driving conditions.
The “hiving off” method has a number of advantages and disadvantages. The
RCA’s Church Multiplication website lists these advantages:
- Sizable starter congregation
- Ninety-seven percent success rate
- Plant becomes independent quickly—often in 18 months or less
- Strong ties between parent and plant.
How quickly the plant becomes independent will depend upon the size of the starter congregation and its composition. Small starter congregations with few substantial givers will require support longer than large starter congregations with many substantial givers.
The Mandeville Mission received no financial support from Christ Church. The money used to rent facilities for its service came from the Bishop’s Ventures in Mission Fund. Once the new congregation became a mission of the Diocese, the support of the Diocese was reduced incrementally every year and the mission was required to take on a larger share of its budget. This was done to encourage the mission to become self-supporting as quickly as possible.
What the
RCA's Church Multiplication website lists as a disadvantage—the loss of members from the parent church, I have not found to be a disadvantage. It might more accurately be described as a mistaken belief. The parent church will initially lose some members. But if the parent church is healthy church, it will quickly replace these members. Christ Church enjoyed a growth spurt after it launched the Mandeville Mission. It would eventually go from two services on Sunday mornings to three. Having a new church within its shadow would provide a stimulus for further growth.
The two churches were also quite different. Christ Church had a very formal traditional style of worship while St. Michael’s had a more relaxed contemporary style of worship. While both churches used an eclectic blend of traditional and contemporary worship music, St. Michael’s would use a larger selection of contemporary worship songs. Uplifted hands stood out at Christ Church but not at St. Michael’s. St. Michael’s today bears no resemblance to St. Michael’s during its first decade of existence.
The chief disadvantage of the “hiving off” method is that the group which is used to form the starter congregation will have pre-conceived idea of how church should be done. There will be pressure from within this group to put its preferences first. There is a very real danger of ecclesial praxis being given priority over missional engagement. There will also be a tendency to reach out to people like the group rather than the wider unchurched or loosely-churched population. It is more likely to grow by transfers than conversions.
Whoever gathers the group from within the congregation of the parent church will need to recruit individual and families who are willing to leave their preferences behind at the parent church and to mix with people who are different from themselves—people who do not think like they do or share their values. Too often the sole criterion that will be used in gathering the group is that its members live in the neighborhood or community in which the new church is to be planted.
The church planter will need to do training and development with the group so that everyone is on the same page as to what is to be the vision, core beliefs, and values of the new church. The planter will need to frequently remind the group of the new church’s vision, core beliefs, and values. The planter will also need to be prepared to deal with any attempts to hijack its vision, core beliefs, and values.
The planter will need to have some kind of screening process for vetting potential members of the group in regard to their suitability as church pioneers. Those whom the rector of Christ Church asked to form the nucleus of the Mandeville Mission, he personally screened for their commitment to the mission of the Church and the resources, skills and spiritual gifts that they could offer the new congregation. A church leader can do untold damage to a plant if he sees the starter congregation as a dumping ground for those he considers to be undesirables in the parent church. Unfortunately some church leaders do think this way. They are not seriously committed to the success of the plant.
The rector of Christ Church was upfront from the beginning that the new congregation was not going to be a chapel of ease for members of Christ Church living in Mandeville. As he explained to the congregation of Christ Church, Mandeville had once had an Episcopal church of its own before the Civil War. However, the Civil War and the yellow fever epidemics that followed it had decimated the congregations of All Souls in Mandeville and Christ Church. The remnants of the two congregations had merged into a single congregation which enabled Christ Church not only to survive the vicissitudes of the post-Civil War era but also to flourish in the ensuing years. Christ Church was sending out members of its congregation to plant a new church in Mandeville part in repayment for the sacrifice the congregation of All Souls made in the nineteenth century and part in order to meet the needs of a growing community. As he explained to me, he also saw the establishment of the new church in Mandeville as a way of reinvigorating Christ Church. It would have that effect.
The second method of planting a new church with which I am familiar is a “parachute drop.” In a “parachute drop” a sponsoring church, denomination, or parachurch organization sends a full-time planter into a new community to start a new church from scratch. The church planter in question was Lane Corley, a young pastor from Fort Worth, Texas, whom the North Shore Baptist Association hired to plant a new church in Waldheim, Louisiana. You can read his own account of how he planted Hope Church of Waldheim on his own blog in the post, “
Overheard, as a North American Church Planter.” I also recommend his post, “
Assessing the Need for New Churches.”
What Lane does not tell you in his account of how he planted Hope Church is that he was a bi-vocational church planter. He cleaned office buildings at night and got to know the community and its people during the day. He became a volunteer fire department chaplain. He hung out wherever people in the target area gathered. He and wife went from door to door and conducted a community needs survey. This enabled them not only to meet the area’s residents but also to identify what the area's residents thought were the area’s most pressing needs, needs that a new church might meet. He started a Bible study group and then multiplied that group. He recruited students from the New Orleans Baptist Seminary to assist him in the new work. They included an African student and his family.
Lane's original plan was to establish a network of small groups before holding Hope Church first service of public worship—in other words, to launch large, following the Purpose-Driven approach. However, the North Shore Baptist Association did not fully understand that plan and pressured him to launch earlier than he planned. He tells the rest of the story in his post.
I became involved in Hope Church while it was still using the fire station bay for its worship gatherings. Lane would baptize my oldest grandnephew when he made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ.
The
RCA’s Church Multiplication website lists these advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages:
- Can plant anywhere
- Your ministry reaches new areas
Disadvantages:
- Costs up to $100,000 yearly in urban contexts
- Twenty-five to fifty percent success rate
- Need a motivated and gifted leader (4.2 or higher on Ridley scale)
Hope Church of Waldheim was not my first exposure to this method of church planting. I was also involved in an unsuccessful AMiA parachute drop church plant in 2002. I learned a number of things from the failure of this plant.
The planter needs to have funding for more than six months. I would say that he may need funding for three years at least. Whether a church sponsors the plant or the planter raises his own funds, they must plan for the long haul. Starting a new church from scratch takes time. While in a few rare cases it may be accomplished in a few months, such cases are not the norm. The planter needs to be prepared for a long hard slog. He will face all kinds of discouragement.
The planter needs to focus on the unchurched and loosely-churched people in the target community. If he is planting an Anglican church, he may attract well-meaning disaffected Episcopalians from outside of the community. They may be new to the community or have a limited social relationship network in the community. They may be socially-isolated. None of the people in these categories make good additions to the core group or nucleus of a new congregation.
The early stages of a “parachute drop” involve establishing and building relationships with people in the target community, particularly those who have an extensive social relationship network in the community. A planter meets people through people. The planter needs in the nucleus of the new congregation people who have these kinds of relationship networks as well as people who are willing to meet people different from themselves, and form relationships with these people.
A successful new church plant is built on an expanding web of relationships. This web of relationships serves as a conduit for the good news which is passed on from one person to the next. Those who come to faith are discipled. Those who have not reached the stage where they are ready to accept Jesus as their Savior and Lord are prayed for, loved, and ministered to.
In a way it is like caring for house plants and garden plants. Depending on what kind of plants they are, they need plant food, watering, and sunlight. They all need tender loving care. Some we may see bloom. Others may bloom in someone else’s care. Our job is to tend the plants so that they have a good chance to grow and bloom. Whether they do is in God’s hands. God does things in his time and not ours. This truth, however, does not relieve us of the responsibility of doing all that we can in caring for the plants.
Disaffected Episcopalians also do not make good church pioneers. For one thing they are apt to have rather fixed ideas about “doing church.” They also come from a denomination which has embraced the post-modern, post-Christian cultural norm that religion is a matter of private conscience and talking about religious beliefs infringes upon an individual’s privacy and has generally discouraged its members from sharing their faith with others and in which very few churches, even conservative ones, encouraged their congregations to do so. They have a built-in set of inhibitions about telling people about Jesus. Despite the emphasis upon inclusivisim in the Episcopal Church, Episcopalians tend to be uneasy around people who are not in the same ethnic, racial, and social economic group as they are. Conservative Episcopalians are even more tribal.
A third method of church planting with which I have some familiarity is the church split. The
RCA’s Church Multiplication website provides following description of this method.
Disagreements lead a group from within a congregation to split off and form their own church. This is not ideal, but it happens.
The
same website lists one advantage and three disadvantages to church splits.
In the 1970s, the 1990s, and the opening decade of the twenty-first century a number of groups split off from an Episcopal congregation and formed their own church. A number of these churches would split again over theological differences and leadership. They would switch back and forth between jurisdictions. The jurisdictions themselves merged and split. The result was a nimiety of small weak congregations, each which served as a temporary safe haven for a particular group of disaffected Episcopalians.
I say “temporary” because these churches were planted for such a group and not for the community which surrounded them. As this group shrank, the church planted for the group would inevitably decline to the point of closure. One might describe them as disposable churches, an expression of North America’s throw-away culture with its emphasis upon consumerism. A few churches have made the transition to churches for the community and experienced a new lease on life. Most have not.
At issue is not whether the groups that broke with the Episcopal Church had legitimate reasons for severing their relationship with that denomination but rather the form that the churches they planted would take. As at least one Continuing Anglican leader has belatedly acknowledged that a major shortcoming of the Continuum was that its churches did not give sufficient emphasis to evangelism. But I do not see how they could. Reaching the spiritually lost was not the reason for which they were created. Catering to the needs of a disaffected element of the Episcopal Church or a Continuing Anglican jurisdiction was. Evangelism was not written into the program. Having a traditional form of worship and an all male priesthood was. That is why these churches were formed and that is why they are dying. It is too late to write evangelism into the program.
The same thing is happening to the churches that were formed in the 1990s and this century’s opening decade. The reason for their creation may have changed. But unless evangelism was written into their program, they are not going to thrive. They may struggle to survive for a few more years. But they will eventually be forced to close their doors.
Readers may not be familiar with chronic wasting disease (CWD) that is affecting the wild deer population in parts of North America. It is a prion disease like “mad cow’s disease,” or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but which affects cervids, members of the deer family, and humans. Deer hunters are being warned to have the deer that they shoot tested for CWD. It turns the deer into zombies who stagger around, slowly wasting away until they die. The condition of these churches is similar to that of the deer infected with this disease. The deer do not recover from the disease. It is invariably fatal.
These churches, however, can do one thing that the dying deer cannot. They can leave a legacy of ministry behind them. The
RCA’s Church Multiplication website describes this method of church planting as “Fresh Start.”A church can make a decision to close and can arrange to have a new congregation moves into its building after it closes. This is the best way that a church can advance the cause of the gospel when revitalizing the congregation is not a realistic possibility.
I am acquainted with one instance of a healthy church emerging from a church split. This church, however, was not launched until almost a year after the split occurred. The cause of the split was a disagreement over the leadership and long-term goals of the church that experienced the split. It was not related to developments in the Episcopal Church. The charismatic element in the group that split from the congregation wanted to plant a new church but the bishop withheld his permission out of fear that it would further weaken the ministry of the church which had experienced the split. He changed his mind when the AMiA announced that it was planting a new church in the community. He permitted the launch of the new church to counter the AMiA’s church planting efforts. The plant, while it enjoyed the support of the bishop, did not enjoy the support of the local deanery. A team of clergy from the bishop’s former deanery preached and officiated at its worship gatherings. A Continuing Anglican priest, later bishop also preached and officiated at these gatherings.
The new congregation would grow rapidly and was enjoying a measure of success in reaching the area’s unchurched population when the events of 2003 devastated the diocese. It became a shadow of its former self and eventually disbanded. A number of the people who were involved in the plant would migrate to the Anglican Church in North America following its disbandment.
I was involved in the plant during its early stages, primarily as an observer since I was also involved in the AMiA plant. It did attract a number of people who otherwise might have become involved in the AMiA plant. The AMiA was an unknown quantity for them. They also had not reached the point where they had given up on the Episcopal Church. Sometimes clergy and congregations must learn the hard way that a denomination is not friendly to what they believe and practice.
The fourth method of planting churches with which I am familiar has been described as the Purpose-Driven approach. Brandon Cox summarizes this approach in his blog post, “
5 Essential Ingredients for Planting Purpose Driven Churches.”
You can launch large, with momentum, which involves a timeline of six to twelve months and a series of steps leading toward a launch with as many people involved as possible. Ron Sylvia literally wrote the book on this with Planting Churches on Purpose.
The
Journey Church here in Murray, Kentucky launched large. Todd Gray tells a part of the back story to the planting of the Journey Church in his Western Recorder article, “
REACHing Kentucky: Journey Church started on Murray State Campus with boost from Benton Baptists.” As Matt Johnson, founding pastor of the Journey Church, tells the story, the Journey Church began as an idea that he and his former college roommate Jarod Martin and a group of their friends who were students at Murray State University were tossing around about starting a church on the campus of the university. Matt and Jarod were both graduates of Murray State University. They had shared a room at the Baptist Campus Ministry building. They would form a launch team, secured the use of the ballroom of the Curris Center for their first worship service of worship, and then used a variety of methods to gather a crowd for that service—direct mailings, word of mouth, door to door, and so on. They discovered that door to door did not work well in Murray.
After the initial service they focused upon developing the new church by discipling the crowd into a core through the church’s Sunday gatherings, ministry teams, and small groups. For an explanation of crowd-to-core growth, see Daniel Morgan’s
Overview of Purpose Driven Church Planting.
I became involved with the Journey Church about ten months after the church was launched. While I would, with Matt’s encouragement, become involved in a preaching ministry at a small Anglican church in Benton a little over two years ago, I still participate in one of the Journey Church’s small groups.
During the almost ten years I was more actively involved in the Journey Church, I identified two other influences that were shaping the thinking of the church’s leadership team. These influences are Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger’s
Simple Church: Returning to God's Process for Making Disciples and Andy Stanley’s books. The church also uses a number of resources that Northpoint Community Church has developed.
During the same time period I noticed a shift in focus away from Murray’s college student and young adult population to the larger community, in particularly parents with young or teen age children. The Journey Church was forced to change its venue because it had run out of space for its burgeoning children’s ministry. This occurred around the same time I embarked on the preaching ministry at the Anglican Church in Benton.
The Journey Church is an attractional church. The accessible location, the semi-professional rock-concert style worship band, the contemporary Christian and praise and worship music, Matt’s preaching, the relaxed informal atmosphere, the provision of free breakfast, and the involvement of students in various leadership and ministry positions initially attracted a sizable number of Murray State University students. However, student attendance and participation would taper off as one generation of students graduated from Murray State University and new generation of students enrolled in the university. The Journey Church subsequently became more community-focused.
There are indications that students now enrolling in the university would be more responsive to a missional approach. They are not going to get up on Sunday morning to hear a great band and Matt's preaching. However, they are willing to make time for community service projects, fund raisers, and the like if it is for a cause about which they are passionate.
The Journey Church has entered a new phase in its life as a church. It is raising the funds to purchase a 20 acre site on which it plans to build a conference center, which will also double as a worship center. With the construction of that facility it will be moving off the campus of Murray State University. It will be leaving its days of being a campus church behind it and will be taking the final step in its transition from being a campus church to a community church.
The advantage of the Purpose-Driven approach is that it is focused. Churches that launch large grow more quickly than churches that start small. At the same time churches that are launched with this approach also tend to become attractional churches. As attractional churches they can become consumer-driven. This raises questions about how effective they are at making disciples.
A disturbing trend that I have noticed in attractional churches that are influenced by Andey Stanley’s writings is the tendency to deemphasize the place of the Bible in the life of a disciple. Stanley appears to see the Bible as a barrier, or obstacle, to reaching the unchurched with the gospel and therefore seeks to reduce that barrier, or obstacle, by downplaying its importance to faith in Jesus Christ. It is argued that the early Christians did not have the Bible. This claim ignores the fact that early Christians had the Jewish Bible—the Old Testament. A number of Paul’s letters were also circulating among the churches. This view is causing confusion in the minds of some believers and has, in some cases, led them to embrace the views of writers like
Rob Bell and
Brian McLaren who treat the Bible as collection of writings that embody human reflections upon the nature of God and his relationship with humankind and which are not divinely-inspired in the sense that God influenced the human authors of the Bible to write what they did. It is effectively undercutting the authority of the Bible in matters of faith and practice. It may be too early to say how this trend may impact evangelical Christians in North America but in a population segment that has high levels of biblical and theological illiteracy is is bound to have an impact.
These four methods of church planting are the ones with which I am the most familiar. In an upcoming article I plan to look at a number of common mistakes that those planting new Anglican churches have made and how these mistakes might be avoided. A number of the same mistakes are also made by those launching non-Anglican churches. It is my belief that Anglicans and non-Anglicans can learn from each others’ mistakes. I am hoping that this upcoming article will prove helpful to both Anglicans and non-Anglicans.
Image Credit: Rogers Park Anglican Church/Greenhouse Movement
