Five Scary Trends (Pt 4: Planting Pandemic)

This week we're looking at Five Scary Trends that Could Sink the Church. I am not camping out here to spread doom and gloom; I'm actually very bullish on the local church. My goal is to shine the light on cracks in the foundation that could keep us from becoming the overcoming church God called us to. So let's look at Scary Trend Five:

Planting Pandemic

Who knew that church planting could become trendy? My grandfather was a church planter in Oklahoma back in the 1940s and 50s, and it was anything but glamorous. There were no conferences, web sites or networks; just Grandpa, Grandma and their three kids scratching out an existence on donated food and hand me down clothes; preaching the Gospel to sharecroppers and farmhands. 

But now it seems like every young leader is thinking about planting a church, and churches are popping up in every school, theater and warehouse in sight. Each church plant seems uniquely the same as every other church plant; same music, same four piece band, same lights, same culturally relevant message uniquely geared to the same subset of society. When you scratch below the surface you find that the majority of the attenders at many of these cookie cutter plants are transplants from other churches. (We even have name for it: split+plant=splant) Are we just subdividing the herd and moving them into different pastures?

We can't continue to plant churches to plant churches. The formulas we used for the past 30 years aren’t as effective any more (except to draw a crowd of disgruntled church attenders from other churches). We have to stop planting churches to plant churches and we have to crack the code on reaching into the community where the majority of people don't give God or church a second thought.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying we need fewer church plants. I believe we need more church plants. Many, many more. But we need new models. We need models that can grow slower but still be sustainable. We need bi-vocational church planters who don’t have the pressure to get the tithe up quickly to pay the bills. (Show me a new church with a big tithe income and I’ll show you a church split.) . We need visionary mega-church pastors who will financially back younger leaders starting radically different congregations.

And this goes way beyond just house churches. House churches are great for a certain niche, but over and over people have shown a desire, a need, to gather in larger groups. We need more house churches, more community churches, more mega-churches that are ACTUALLY reaching people far from God. That's where i want to put the majority of my time and energy for the next several years, helping new leaders find new ways to break the church planting code in America and beyond. What examples have you seen of church plants that reach beyond the walled garden and impact those far from God? How can we replicate those models?

So far this week we’ve looked at Multisite Mania, Reform Revolution, Worship Worship and the Planting Pandemic. Tomorrow we’ll finish by looking at what I believe is the scariest trend of all: Pastor Praise. 

 

Comments

[Derwin L. Gray]

Great read with some outstanding points! Thank you.

Derwin

[Dan Smith]

Young church leaders want to plant churches because of two things. First, the fame is in planting churches because Warren, Hybels, et al planted churches they still pastor. Secondly, going to existing churches is hard work and painful...much more so than planting a church (in modern times). And the fact is that the current church doesn't even like trying to rescue damaged churches. Better to cut ties and move on. A guy trying to recruit me to plant churches once told me, it's easier to birth a baby that resurrect a dead man.

[Zakk Roberts]

I'm loving this series!! Real talk, I'm part of a team that's planting a church at the University of Pittsburgh. We're coming from churches on campus at the Michigan State University and the University of Missouri. If anyone is up to hearing more, I would love to talk about it :)

[Ron Swanson]

Like the series Geoff.

[Ivey Rhodes]

I was under the impression, maybe falsely, that population growth had outpaced church plant growth. For instance per capita there are less churches now than in 1950.

Either way I agree that we have reach inside the communities. That is a code our little church plant has been trying to crack for almost 10 years. We've had some success.

[Matthayton716]

We are getting ready to plant in Wisconsin and are considering a model that would be a hybrid: missional and attractional model.

Thought is to launch a network/life group/missional community which would meet 2x a month to start and then after a period of time (6-12 months), move into a rhythm of one large celebration gathering each month and then network churches(small groups meeting in homes, the other 3 weeks of the month).

5 reasons for this idea/approach:

1. We want to reach the 85% in our area not going to church. If they don't go to church now, then why would they come to ours, if it is very similar to the others in our area? Concept is a church for the unchurched, which I think may look different than the typical attractional church in America.

2. I would rather fail at trying to innovate church for future unchurched generations than be a successful carbon-copy church plant and just reach mostly transfer Christians.

3. After reading Bowling Alone(Putnam) and The Search to Belong(Myers), I am convinced that there is a felt social void for the average American. Most unbelievers do not crave a Sunday morning church service, they crave friendship. Idea is to invert the church model(focusing on small spaces & augmenting w/a public space), in order to meet people where they are at.

4. Our once-a-month gathering will be excellent. We would treat this like a conference/retreat, mountain-top type experience, pulling out all the stops to have a great gathering: Quality over quantity.

5. Part of this is necessity: We are currently in significant debt due to some bad real estate investments, so I cannot quit my job(sales gig, travel 2x a month) to go into full-time ministry. So instead of waiting to plant 3-4 years from now, we figure why not do what we can now. But I don't want to do something poorly and if we tried to pull off Sunday AM services every week, I do not think it would be excellent, due to my day job.