Joby Martin: Why Churches Must Multiply, Not Just Grow (Part 1)

We began to invest talent and resources into leadership toward multiplication. Fast-forward—we now have a pastor of multiplication. And so with that, we started a school of ministry, we have a residency and we have at least 10% of our budget going to plant churches.

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Ultimately, as lead pastor, I knew I had to cast vision for all of it, but I was not going to be the one primarily guiding the reproducing. I was just the one to set up the environment in our church through which we would do it.

I think about it as a stewardship issue. Maybe we are a “five-talent” church. If so, what if we will not be judged based on how big we grow, but on how well we plant? That is an issue of stewardship. And so far, I am encouraged by the results. In fact, maybe a year before COVID-19, we celebrated a pretty cool milestone—the attendance of the churches we had planted exceeded our weekend attendance here at Eleven22. And so we celebrated that. People understand that what you celebrate is really what you value. So we choose to celebrate those kinds of things.

In Part 2 of our interview with Joby Martin where he discusses how Church of Eleven22 serves as a launchpad for other churches, the church-planting insights they gleaned from America’s war on terror and how the COVID-19 pandemic has informed and will inform their ministry going forward.