In 2 weeks, All Saints Church, the church that I founded in my living room will turn 5.
When I created a prospectus in 2016 to present to my denomination for funding, I created a growth projector that said by 2022, we’d average 200 worshipers a Sunday and have a 400K budget of internal giving.
I was only off by about 170 worshipers and 360K.
Not bad.
My story is not abnormal. We have less people worshiping with us than we did in 2019. Our giving, both external and internal is down, and we are rebuilding the teams we worked tirelessly to build pre-Covid.
For all intents and purposes, we’re starting over.
But here I am in 2022, declaring that church planting, something that I love so deeply and have committed much of my life too is sadly, dead.
Not churches, but church plants in their current form and the movement and models that has brought so many new churches to life in the last 20 years is over.
Where did we go wrong?
The first mistake we made has everything to do with the money.
I was listening again to Gimlet Media’s Startup Podcast about Church Planting. For those who haven’t listened, it shares the story of a pastor in Philadelphia who has to grow his congregation to meet their budget needs. The stress, the struggle, the doubts, the insecurities are all laid bare on how do I as an urban pastor gather enough people in a room on Sunday to keep the lights on.
Our first problem with the current model is it costs too much and it’s not sustainable unless one of 3 things happen:
- The church reaches believers who are in the habit of already tithing, which is not why any church planter that I know got into ministry but seems to be standard (I’ll talk more on this later).
- The pastor has a deep network of wealthy donors that can fund the church plant over a multiple year period, which only works if you have relational capital with the right people and even then, it’s not a long term strategy.
- The pastor foregoes a church salary and works in the marketplace to maximize the money coming in to be put back into the mission. Very few pastors are willing to do this but it is becoming increasingly common, particularly post-Covid.
The second mistake we made has everything to do with the pastor.
I, like most church planters went through a rigorous assessment process with the denominations and networks that I am affiliated with. Yes, my wife had to come too though she asked a good question, “Why am I interviewing when it’s your job?”
Assessments measure many aspects of the pastor, from leadership to calling to emotional health. It’s part job interview, part therapy, part boot camp, part audition.
Though I am not ‘on the inside’ of how these assessments are done, I have engaged with enough church planters to know there are a few qualities that get the green light and others that don’t.
The majority of church planters who emerge with the endorsement behind them are charismatic, driven, likeable, and energetic. It also doesn’t hurt if you went to the right school or came from the right church or had the right pastor sponsoring you.
Speaking from experience.
I’m not saying this to be cynical, yet rarely in my assessments was I asked about my private prayer life, my spiritual practices or disciplines, my family worship, or who was holding me accountable to walk in a way worthy of Christ.
I was asked quite a bit about mission, vision, values and strategy.
I don’t think being charismatic or likeable or strategic are detriments to a pastor or church planter yet to stop there stops short.
The solution would be to celebrate just as there is more than one type of church, there is more than one type of church planter.
Not all will have Type-A personalities, be within the right age range (usually 30–45), married with 2.5 children. And praise God for that! He is calling all types of people to start and lead churches!
If we want to see more churches planted, we have to evaluate how we’re assessing church planters. That process is due for an overhaul.
The third mistake we make has everything to do with the model.
In 2016, I called a pastor of a well known church plant in the Southwest and shared my vision of reaching people far from God.
“I don’t want to just reach Christians,” I explained to him.
He cut me off at that line and said, “Eric, that is just ‘cool guy talk’ you have to reach Christians. How else will you build a team, get critical mass, buy a building and grow this thing?”
I was shocked and thought that was just an ‘unpopular opinion’ but heard the same sentiment over and over. One pastor telling me, “This is the dark and dirty secret about church planting… we’re not actually reaching people like we claim we are.”
I refused to believe it, even read research that spoke on the contrary, until I went to a church planting conference in Atlanta and one of the speakers prayed over a large room of church planters like me, “Lord, help us not just be content with transfer growth.”
It was an epiphany that 95% of my church plant were people that either grew up in church, moved to my city and got plugged into my congregation or came from another church, typically one a few blocks away.
Why does this happen? Because church plants model themselves after established churches.
Sunday mornings at 11am with worship music, preaching, kid’s ministry and coffee and donuts in the foyer.
It’s what our church does as well and it creates a soft landing for church people to engage us, yet am I moving the needle to what God has called me to 6 years ago when I had a Bible Study in my apartment with my neighbors who didn’t go to church?
Where did I go wrong?
In conclusion… Not churches, but church plants in their current form and the movement and models that has brought so many new churches to life in the last 20 years is over.
What will replace it?
- Pastors who are bivocational; equippers of leaders with a team-first approach to ministry.
- Pastors and ministry leaders who have a deeply cultivated personal walk with God that is prioritized over their outward skillset.
- Models of church that are not just “mini established churches” where the majority of growth is transfer.
What will that look like tangibly?
If I were to guess, I would say church plants for the next 20 years will be smaller in number, leadership will be structurally flat, congregations will be nimble and by God’s grace, growth will happen by multiplication, not addition.
Ultimately, time will tell but if the last 2 years taught us anything, it taught us what we are doing is no longer working.
Thankfully Jesus builds his church.
I’m grateful to be a tiny part of that.
