11 Tips for Supporting a Church Plant

Even before COVID-19 began, there was a shift toward fewer Protestant churches in the United States. According to a Lifeway Research study on Protestant church closures, only 3,000 Protestant churches were started in the U.S. in 2019, while 4,500 churches were closed. But this closure gap may have left an opening for new churches to reach an ever-growing U.S. population. Read More

While church planting has proven effective in reaching and engaging the unchurched population of a community in the past, it will only do so today if a particular church plant intentionally focuses upon reaching and engaging that segment of a community's population.

Too many new churches have been planted in recent years have not made reaching and engaging a community's unchurched population their number one priority.

My former church shut down a church plant that it had launched in a neighboring community for that reason. It had become a "chapel of ease," "a chapel situated for the convenience of parishioners living a long distance from the parish church," and the congregation had not grown beyond the core group with which the new work was launched.

A new church plant that does not have evangelism in its DNA, is not connected with the community in which it was planted, makes little or no effort to establish such a connection, and is inward -looking, placing its preferences before community engagement will not flourish. It may be several years, even a decade or two, before the congregation disbands but eventually it will.