Fast Growing Church Plants

According to studies, most new churches start and remain small. However, strong interest exists in the launch large approach. Acts 1 and 2 indicate that the Early Church went from 120 believers to 3,120 believers overnight. In the first year after Christ’s death, the number of believers increased to over 20,000.¹ Church planter Ron Sylvia is one of the voices that believes “launching large is congruent with the best of missionary theology and with the methods of Jesus.”² Such large starts lead to momentum, credibility, and status as self-supporting will soon follow.³

Stephen Gray is a researcher who compared 60 fast-growing church plants and 52 struggling church plants to try to understand the factors that enabled churches to grow larger than 200 in their first 3 years. He has a new book developing this research called, Planting Fast Growing Churches.

Gray found that in successful church plants:

• 88 percent have church planting teams.
• 63 percent have a core group of 26 to 75 people.
• 75 percent use a contemporary style of worship.
• 80 percent put 10 percent or more of their budgets toward outreach and evangelism.
• 16 percent have a higher rate of full-time pastors than struggling church plants.
• 63 percent of planters leading fast-growing plants raise additional funding, compared to 23 percent of those that are struggling.

Church planters leading fast growing church plants felt a greater sense of support from their pastoral colleagues and surrounding churches, they have more fellowship with other pastors, their work is more highly celebrated by their denomination, and they experience far less negativity from their direct superiors than did those planters leading struggling church plants.

ED STETZER, Alpharetta, Georgia, is missiologist and senior director of the Center for Missional Research at the North American Mission Board, Southern Baptist Convention. From “Improving the Health and Survivability of New Churches,” Leadership Network. Used with permission.

Notes

1. Bill Easum and Bil Cornelius, Go Big: Lead Your Church to Explosive Growth (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006), 7.

2. Ron Sylvia, Starting New Churches on Purpose (Lake Forest, Calif.: Purpose Driven Publishing, 2006), 108.

3. Ibid., 109.