Launching vs. Planting a Church

on March 9th, 2007

Hadn’t heard this concept before, really its just semantics of language, but I like it. From The Christian Post:

New church plants typically start out small, some as a Bible study in a home or in the basement of an office building. But pastors launching a new church planting initiative this year are telling fellow leaders, “Launch large!”

Hundreds of pastors and church workers are scheduled to attend NEXT Conference on Tuesday to play a role in a network’s newest initiative – starting 1,000 new churches in the next five years. The two-day conference in Ocala, Fla., will teach the popular Purpose Driven church model – coined by megapastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church – for successful church starts across the nation.

The Purpose Driven Planting network, separate from Saddleback Church, steers away from the word church “plant” in its latest effort. Instead, it encourages a church “launch.”

“‘Planting’ denotes slow growth … like a tree,” the Rev. Jim Cowart, one of the conference speakers, told The Christian Post. “We started using the analogy of ‘launching’ because the Purpose Driven model tries to teach pastors to launch large and healthy.”

Rather than encourage a small start, NEXT conference is aimed to help pastors skip over all the growth barriers, Cowart explained.

One of the most common mistakes church planters make is starting with “a core group rather than a launch group,” said Cowart. “It goes back to the old model of planting churches – starting small.” Although Cowart is not opposed to small beginnings, he said the Purpose Driven model teaches the opposite – launch large.

“A crowd can be turned into a church.”

JG


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Josh Byers at 2:14pm March 9

I’m not sure if it is just semantics – in the article the author points out that Harvest Church was started with 120 people.

My question is, where do all these people come from? Unless you have a mega-church this concept is really not feasible.

I am part of a group that started a new church a little over a year ago. 24 adults came from a church of almost 800.

It has been my experience that unity and like-mindedness are very critical to the process of a brand new church starting out. This would be harder to achieve the bigger the starting group gets.

I do like the term “launch” a lot better than “plant” however.

Jay at 3:35pm March 9

We’ll be moving to MN this June to “launch” a new church. I will be teaming up with two other planting pastors with complementary gifts.

One of the things we’ve seen is that churches almost never break through the small-church growth stage. People come to the church because it is small and friendly and leave when it starts getting big (or subtly sabotage church growth). So we’re planning to completely bypass the small-church growth phase.

After we’ve been on the ground for a while with a growing core team (new converts as well as other churches in the area giving us missionary members), our plan is to have once-per-month, heavily-advertized, pre-launch, beta-testing, preview services for as long as it takes to gain a critical mass of around 300. It will give us an opportunity to fine-tune our style, test out our discipleship and assimilation systems, and enroll attendees in the mission of starting this very large church from scratch.

Lyle Shaller says (in The Very Large Church) that it makes a lot of sense for church plants to begin with at least 100 core members and to expect 300 at their launch, if they hope to grow large…

Thanks for the great post.