Church Multiplication: 5 Paradigm Shifts to Move Beyond Addition
“You are perfectly designed to get the results you’re getting.”
It’s difficult to discern who made that statement originally, yet it persists because to a large degree it is true. That may not feel like good news to you if you’re not happy with what you’re seeing in your church. In fact, many of the church leaders I talk to recognize that something needs to change. Like a splinter in the mind there is an uneasy feeling that there may be something fundamentally wrong with some facets of the church, including church multiplication.
Why are we seeing so few churches that are actually reproducing and multiplying and not simply adding?
The Problem with the Addition Model
What we at Exponential have observed is a sort of magnet that draws us to do everything we can to add as many people as possible to our weekend gatherings. This effort nearly universally starts out of a passion to have as many people as possible attend to hear the gospel. But, because this metric is tied to the economic model of the church (as well as pastor and church notoriety), it can sometimes become addition for addition’s sake.
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The result is that many (perhaps most) of the things you do to grow church attendance become the very things that make it difficult to move toward multiplication. If you’ve invested heavily in addition, with staffing to run programs or debt to build bigger buildings, it becomes difficult to think about sending and releasing. Even the social contract you make with people can be difficult to change. If you’ve said, “Come here and we’ll give you relevant messages, meaningful worship and a place you’re not embarrassed to bring your neighbors,” it can be very difficult to then say, “We want you to leave this church to be part of a church plant.” As A.W. Tozer emphasized, what you win them with, you win them to.
But there is good news.
