Church Growth: 6 Signs of ‘Addition Addiction’

2. Initiate meetings with other church leaders in your area who are planting churches. Listen to their story of moving from addition to multiplication and ask questions like:

What personal fears did you have to confront as you considered what becoming a multiplying church might look like?

What did you do first?

How did you secure leadership and overall church buy-in?

How did you make church planting a priority in your church?

What initial goals did you set?

How did you begin to identify potential church planters?

How did you resource them?

What challenges did you face from both your leadership team and the church as a whole? How did you navigate them?

What keeps you going? What motivates you to continue to pursue multiplication?

What’s next? What are your short-term and long-term multiplication goals?

Seek the counsel of these leaders for fighting addition addiction and look for any multiplication opportunities to partner with them.

3. Let your leadership know that multiplication is a priority to you because it is a priority to God. Secure buy-in from your team as you begin to suggest ways to focus on church planting. Work with your leadership team to develop multiplication goals for the next year, the next three years and the next five years.

4. In the church’s budget, allocate resources to church planting. Multiplying leaders tell us that until the church added “church planting” as a line item on the budget, they saw little traction. Allocating resources demonstrates intentionality and commitment.

5. Begin to make multiplication—not addition—a weekend priority. Start talking about church planting as part of your mission as a church. Paint the bigger picture, showing people that God has called his church to multiply. Introduce a series on the Acts 2 church. At the end of the series, roll out the multiplication goals you and the leadership team have put together.

6. Begin to identify potential church planters in your church and start to resource them, sending them to church-planting conferences and assessment. Consider joining a national church planting network, such as NewThing, Association of Related Churches or a regional network in your area. Church planting networks offer numerous opportunities to help churches resource planters.

7. Check out some of the resources available that can help you identify and attack addition addiction. Many are free to access and download. Exponential has numerous e-books that focuses on multiplication from practitioners. Check out Becoming a Level Five Multiplying Church by Todd Wilson and Dave Ferguson; Flow: Unleashing a River of Multiplication in Your Church, City and World and Play Thuno: The World-Changing Multiplication Game by Larry Walkemeyer; the “Becoming Five” online assessment tool for discovering your church’s multiplication profile (Level 1 to 5) and multiplication pattern; free podcasts from the Exponential 2016 conference; and the website NewChurches.com.

I truly believe that only through multiplication will we make an exponential impact on the growing lostness of our world. We cannot afford to miss this revolutionary time in the history of the church.

Mac Lake serves as the visionary architect for Multiply Group. Lake successfully planted a church in 1997, spending seven years there and then another seven years as the leadership development pastor at Seacoast Church based in South Carolina. Lake provides overall leadership to the Multiply Group team as well as serving as the coaching maximizer. To learn more about multiplication and church planting, go to Exponential.org.

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