When Lead Pastor Pete Mueller attended his first Exponential conference in Orlando many years ago, he heard something that convicted him: Almost every new church says they want to plant churches, but almost none do.
In 2009, when he came to Lakeway, Texas, and helped relaunch a congregation that would become ACTS Church Lakeway, he knew it would be an exception.
“By God’s grace, we won’t just plant the church, but we’ll plant churches that plant churches,” he remembers saying at the time.
“It was really that God-given understanding that I could not get away from, that planting one church was good, but there was something bigger than that.”
From the outset, planting reproducing churches was part of ACTS Church Lakeway’s vision, and it was God’s call on Mueller’s personal ministry, too.
By 2011, the church had started the ACTS Church Network, an organization meant to unite ACTS Church Lakeway and any churches who would be born of it. The network would have its own board, fundraising component and the ability to test new ideas.
According to Mueller, the plan was to incubate church planters within existing churches and then release them after six to nine months to plant the network’s next church. In 2013, ACTS Church Leander would become the network’s first and oldest plant in the city of Leander north of Austin. It’s still thriving today and just moved into its own building after a decade in a strip mall.
Between 2014 and 2017, two additional church plants arose from ACTS Church Lakeway and joined the ACTS Network: ACTS Church Lakeline and ACTS Church Kyle. Unfortunately, they didn’t make it through the pandemic. However, ACTS Church Hays, launched in 2015 in Hays County, on the southwest side of the Austin metro area, still operates today.
Though the three autonomous churches share a common ethos with each other through the ACTS Church Network, they all look a little different and require different levels and types of support. For example, while Lakeway is mature, established and multigenerational, Leander is full of young families with children. Hays, on the other hand, is more of a house church model—small but nimble, serving its community and making a difference in creative ways.
“There’s a lot of encouragement, some fundraising, mentoring, coaching, those kinds of things,” Mueller says of the partnership between the churches in the ACTS Church Network.
He meets with the other pastors monthly, and they share a discipleship staff person who rotates between the three churches to focus specifically on discipleship and multiplication.
“We used to say we wanted to plant churches that plant churches,” Mueller explains. “But now we say we’re making disciples who make disciples who plant churches that plant churches.”
The churches share communication and celebration about what happens in the other congregations. Once a year, they hold an ACTS family reunion and choose one Sunday each fall to worship together.
“It’s based on a relationship,” Mueller says. “If somebody needs help, we’re going to say yes, but we want it to be a wise yes, so we’ll guide and discuss.”
The network and its member churches don’t operate in a silo, though. They also partner with Exponential and with the Texas district of the ACTS churches’ denomination, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Through Exponential, Mueller helps organize learning cohorts from Texas churches. Most recently, he facilitated three cohorts of 75 people from around the state. They also attend the Exponential Global conference and hold their own version of the business reality TV show Shark Tank to help fund creative ministry ideas.
“This is a huge thing that’s helping to further develop this multiplication culture in the state of Texas among leaders in our church body,” Mueller underscores. He also coaches and assists church planters outside of his own network and spanning all of central Texas.
Whether planting another ACTS church directly or helping other Texas church leaders learn how to plant their own churches, Mueller might just be helping to create a new reality: Almost every new church says they want to plant churches, and almost all of them do.