It’s a challenge to balance reflecting on the past and strategizing for the future. This is particularly true when it comes to church planting and church multiplication. Too much looking back, and we can get stuck reveling in yesterday’s victories. But too much looking forward, and we can become so future-oriented that we neglect to see God’s faithfulness in the past and present. Done right, learning from the past and seeing what God is doing in the present can point us to a different kind of future.
This issue, in partnership with the Exponential, aims to help you see clearly in the present by reporting on the state of church planting networks, offering a list of catalytic churches that are accomplishing multigenerational church planting, and doing a deep dive into how to be a “multiplier”—healthy disciple-making leader who champions reproduction. But before we examine all these aspects of multiplication throughout this issue, let’s briefly look back at church planting over the years.
After leading a project under the late Bob Buford of Leadership Network with a team that read all the books on church planting written in English since 1950, I learned that church planting in Western culture developed in three eras from the mid-20th century to the present. I call these eras Church Planting 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.
Church Planting 1.0: Extending Churches
Church planting has existed as long as the church itself. As believers were scattered from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria, toward the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8; see Acts 11; 19–26, as well as Paul’s missionary journeys), they proclaimed the gospel, reached people and established churches. While this pioneering endeavor was called different things at different times in history, today we call this church planting.
In the modern era, Church Planting 1.0 (1950s–1980s), churches undertook the task of extending themselves into a new location. During this period, the operative term was not so much “planting” as it was “extension.” Specific churches would partner with their denomination to extend new churches into a given area.
In 1954, the Assemblies of God Home Mission Department promoted the “Mother Church Plan,” which encouraged established churches to start a “daughter” church. The Southern Baptists had the Church Extension Department of the Home Mission Board (now the North American Mission Board/SEND Network). The focus during this era was primarily on the church as an extension of an existing church and usually connected to the larger denomination.
Church Planting 2.0: Entrepreneurial Church Planting
Gradually, greater focus shifted from the church itself to the church planter, and the church-planter-focused model began to prevail by the 1980s. A plethora of resources focused on church planters and systems emerged with this change. Most influentially, Bob Logan’s Church Planters Toolkit resource shaped how we now think about church planting. Likewise, Kevin Mannoia’s Church Planting: The Next Generation explained how establishing systems would assist planters in growing their churches.
Church planting became less about extension and more about the apostolic impulse, with a new prominence of a church planter. Assessments were created, because of the theory that certain kinds of people with certain personality types would be able to plant churches more successfully. Such planters required a remarkably high capacity for entrepreneurial work. Since the mid-1990s and early 2000s, it has become evident that most church planters were entrepreneurial young men.
I was one of these church planters, first in Buffalo, New York. We started a church, knocked on doors, and grew the church to a few dozen– eventually acquiring a building that now houses a predominantly Burmese congregation. By the time we planted a second church, Millcreek Community Church, we adopted the entrepreneurial nature of church planting, launched large, and grew much more rapidly. So, in a sense, we experienced some of 1.0 and 2.0, but there was a clear shift in the 90s.
As the focus changed, elevating the need for planters to possess greater organizational leadership skill sets, it winnowed the pool of prospective church planters. Someone might have a passion and call for church planting, but lack the entrepreneurial skills shown on a church planter assessment (and therefore not be approved to plant through a funding denomination or network). People like Neil Cole began calling for us to “lower the bar of how church is done, and raise the bar on what it takes to be a disciple.” He didn’t mean lowering the bar theologically or biblically, but lowering the requirement for leading complex organizational systems for churches.
Church Planting 3.0: Diversify and Multiply
Cole, along with others like Wolfgang Simson and Tony and Felicity Dale, began to ask whether we could develop new and different ways to plant churches. Could all kinds of people become involved in all different kinds of church planting—and could that be the next iteration?
While Church Planting 1.0 and 2.0 focused on adding new churches (though some planted church-planting, multiplying churches), today in Church Planting 3.0, people across denominations and theological traditions plant churches that multiply, led by men and women at multiple levels.
Church Planting 3.0 also has borne witness to the reemergence (at least in the West) of other expressions of church multiplication such as missional incarnational communities, influenced in no small part by the works of Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost, including The Shaping of Things to Come.
Many people are indeed engaging in a cultural context through their Christian lifestyle. As the gospel permeates a culture, a church emerges that resembles that culture. Thus, a cowboy church could make as much sense as a Korean church when it’s deeply rooted in the cultural context and the psyche of those involved. While the solo entrepreneur model remains dominant, even Logan eventually moved away from this model toward creating different and new ways of church planting. Likewise, over the past two decades, we’ve seen a multiplication of networks focused on planting.
Church Planting 4.0?
As a missiologist who has researched church planting for decades, I don’t believe church planting has a singular future. There are futures of church planting. Those futures in the West will still be largely driven by culture, as Church Planting 2.0 has shown, so we should expect the future to include entrepreneurial church planting.
That said, church planting in secular places calls for a greater variety of models. For example, often the entrepreneurial model often assumes an existing pool of people who are open to what that entrepreneur offers. Highly motivated to gather a group and plant a church, the planter may find that church planting in secular cultures takes too long and is too hard.
In the United Kingdom, many are talking about “fresh expressions” to plow new ground and resonate with new people. The “Fresh Expressions” journey is not a theoretical idea. It is what we have observed more and more Christians doing across the globe,” English minister and missiologist Mike Moynagh says. “They know the gap between the world and the current church is too big for their friends and contacts to leap across. So they are starting new Christian communities in the nooks and crannies of people’s ordinary lives.” Such fresh expressions are significantly more influential in the U.K. than in the U.S., perhaps because our country still has a substantial population who may be reached by the entrepreneurial model.
The future of church planting in some ways looks like the past, but in other ways it looks like continuing, ongoing missiological engagement where the gospel births people into a church. As the culture changes, we should expect our methods and models to change as well. At Outreach we try to celebrate models and examples people can learn from, observe and critique. And in doing so, I hope we can find better models.
The New Testament doesn’t always give us a norm for our methods. We should be open to different missiological strategies and opportunities. In my conservative side of evangelicalism, people tend to shoot any new missiological life-form crawling out of the primordial ooze of culture. They freeze it, then take it out 20 years later, only to decide that maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Instead, we should hold to our gospel firmly and church planting methods loosely, acknowledging that God uses all kinds of churches to reach all kinds of people.
In the future, church planting is going to look like a tree with a series of branches—people who are seeking to bring new life into church planting. Those branches and those leaves are going to look remarkably different from place to place. We must encourage one another, using missiological discernment to provoke one another to love and good deeds as we plant churches in new and innovative ways. In the midst of all of it, may we remain focused on evangelizing new churches into existence across the world.