Take a walk with us back to March 2020. One by one, venues where people gathered began closing their doors: restaurants, hair salons, gyms—even churches.
Now, the churches are gathering again, but things have not returned to how they used to be. Online services and meetings are still “full.” Tithes and giving are down. People have learned to do life differently, including being part of a church. In a very real sense, life has been forever changed.
So what will church life look like beyond 2022? How do we think through church multiplication going forward, to follow Jesus’ Great Commission to make disciples?
We spoke to church leaders who remain laser-focused on multiplication by centering on the three essential multiplication dimensions Exponential has identified: discipleship, capacity building and mobilization.
Disciple Making
For Hill Country Bible Church, the pandemic brought both clarity and examination. “We really took a deep look into how all of our ministries are structured and whether they serve our mission of saturating Austin with the love of Jesus,” says DeWayne McNally, Hill Country’s executive pastor.
As a result, the church was able to streamline. “One of the best things for me was when one of my team came into my office and said, ‘Someone asked to do something, but it doesn’t fit with our ministry’s purpose. So we’re not doing it.’ We created a focus we didn’t have before.”
That concentration has landed on disciple making, which McNally and his church define as an almost daily process of walking with people over time. Zoom opened up avenues for people to disciple others who were not physically located near them. The church introduced a new discipleship series focusing on biblical manhood and womanhood and saw more than 2,000 participants from around the globe.
The church put more focus on equipping parents to be disciple makers. McNally says, “In 2020, we started to ask parents to build a spiritual growth plan for their entire family.”
Even the church’s calendar reflects Hill Country’s focus on disciple making. “We don’t just have gatherings to hang out,” McNally says. “The focus is on helping people take their next step to become a disciple who makes disciples.”
One of the most significant moves toward multiplication has taken place in the Association of Hill Country Churches, which has changed the language of its purpose from “people working together” to “people working together to plant churches.”
“Some churches in this group have never planted,” McNally explains. “We want everyone to have a vision and plan to reproduce themselves.”
“I think more challenges are ahead for us,” he adds, “but the commission Jesus gave us is worth the battle. For us to reach the next generations, we have to continue to be radical in how we approach things.”
Building Capacity
When Jason Shepperd planted Church Project in The Woodlands near Houston, he knew the idea of people meeting in individual house churches during the week and then coming together on the weekend was unconventional. But he believed that the model of the early church was worth pursuing.
The pandemic, he says, crystalized that pursuit. “The pandemic was sort of a test-case scenario to prove our hypothesis of a church of house churches,” he says. “The New Testament church was built for persecution. So, of course, it would also withstand a pandemic.”
Church Project started with 40 people in two house churches 10 years ago, and the two became four. The members and pastors of each new house church came from a previously existing house church.
In 2020, that culture continued. Church Project intentionally started new house churches and grew by 75%. That growth has driven the need to incubate new house churches more rapidly.
“We’ve had to accelerate the process of training new pastors, all the while looking for more potential leaders. Everyone here understands that the mission is multiplication. And if a house church doesn’t multiply, it atrophies,” Shepperd says.
Church Project, now numbering 6,000, is also increasing its capacity building through HouseChurchNetwork.com—a network that equips leaders to establish a church of house churches through conferences, cohorts and ongoing communication.
“We feel called to address the problem of attrition through helping other churches multiply,” Shepperd explains.
Church Project is a living definition of what it looks like to build capacity through distributed leadership. This return to the early church model of planting churches increases their capacity to identify and empower leaders, which has led to rapid multiplication, he says.
“Multiplication comes through distributed leadership. It stops whenever leadership growth is stifled,” he says. “I actually think if more churches take the leadership away from the centralized clergy and distribute it to the people, we’ll see more rapid multiplication.”
Innovative Mobilization
As we move forward toward the multiplication of churches and disciples, we need both urgency and innovation, says Daniel Yang, director of the Send Institute and the Think Tank for North American Church Planting.
“We need to set up the next generation to really reach people for Jesus,” he says. “Christianity in North America is barely maintaining growth. The things we’ve been doing over the last 20, 40, 60, even 80 years, are creating a status-quo effect.”
To keep up with U.S. population growth, we need 400,000 churches in America by 2050 in order to have one church for every 1,000 people, he says. That’s at least a net gain of 2,100 churches per year.
Are we on the right track? Not even close. Yang uses Lifeway Research’s figures from 2014, estimating that 4,000 were churches and 3,700 closed—a net gain of only 300 churches.
“We’re vastly behind in keeping up with population growth,” he says. “Every year that we aren’t innovating and creating beachheads of new gospel communities across North America, we increase the burden for the next generation. What can we do now to support the next generation so that they’re not forced to catch up because of our lack of innovation and urgency?”
Yang believes it requires more than just a multiplication mindset.
“We need to think about innovative multiplication,” he says. “About creating effective churches all over North America that not only look like those communities, but are sustainable and multiplying.”
Planting the Right Churches
“It’s not enough to plant churches if we’re not planting the right kinds of churches,” Yang says. Innovative multiplication that keeps up with current and future population growth requires that we develop young leaders.
That starts with Gen Z (those born 1997 to 2012) having real input and leadership opportunities in your church today.
Yang explains, “Gen Z and Gen Alpha (born 2013 to 2025) don’t need the youth pastor doing everything for them. Your local church should have meaningful leadership pathways for 12-, 15-, 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds. They’re not just coming to a thing; they’re helping create a thing they can invite their friends to. This is such an important shift in our mindset and infrastructures: to move from Gen Y creating a place for Gen Z to Gen Z creating something for others to join.
“We can get there if we continue to invest in churches that are multiplying now and then encourage and empower the next generations to begin joining the mission with us,” he says. “But we need to do our part now.”
The Great Commission is not optional. Church leaders must continue to forge a path toward God’s vision for the multiplication of his church.
The Church Multiplication Challenge
Exponential’s call to action is a manifesto of sorts that aims to help churches make a public declaration of their commitment toward multiplication. The first step of The Challenge is to affirm six “Truths to Acknowledge” to create a culture of multiplication.
These points inform and influence seven additional “Aspirations to Pursue.”
The goal, Exponential says, is to provide an accountability pathway churches can follow to embrace a commitment toward multiplication. The simple steps of action to accepting the challenge include reviewing the truths and aspirations, and taking the Multiplication Challenge Survey to publicly proclaim your commitment to pursue multiplication.
Exponential’s hope and prayer is to see a tipping point of churches that embrace and act on these points of truth and aspirations as they take risks to find and pour into new wineskins.
WHAT WE BELIEVE TO BE NECESSARY
Any thought or effort toward reproduction and multiplication must be bathed in prayer and fasting.
A new scorecard for success is nonnegotiable.
Multiplication requires personal surrender.
All multiplication movements find their roots in disciple-making movements. Disciple making Jesus’ way is the core mission of the church and the biblical strategy for multiplication. Shifting from a programmatic growth strategy to relational disciple making is critical to a multiplication movement.
To multiply, we must intentionally mobilize everyday missionaries into their everyday mission fields.
Multiplication is the outcome of healthy reproduction to the 4th generation.
WHAT WE COMMIT TO DO
We commit to tithe the firstfruits of our income to church planting regardless of our financial position.
We commit to support church multiplication beyond our finances with tangible, direct involvement.
We commit to make sending a priority and to see every person as a missionary and potential planter.
We commit to taking risks with evangelistic urgency and a missionary mindset.
We commit to planting autonomous churches.
We commit to partnering with others.
We commit to being intentional about reproduction, including prayer, fasting and strategic planning.
To take the Challenge and read how churches are pursuing reproduction in prayerful, strategic and powerful ways, visit ReproducingChurches.org/challenge.
