LOWERING THE COST OF PLANTING CHURCHES
by Ralph Moore
Hope Chapel Kaneohe Bay, Oahu
I love to plant new churches. I’ve had the privilege of participating directly in the birth of more than sixty new churches over the past thirty years. The secondary church plants (granddaughter and great-granddaughter churches) easily triple that number.
Most came to life by hiving off people, money and leaders from the mother church. That is by far the easiest way to plant a new congregation. It also guarantees a measure of success. Over the life of my pastoral tenure, we have on four different occasions given away an excess of twenty percent of our members to a new congregation. God has always replaced the people and the mother church has never yet regretted a birth.
Thinking Differently
But, recent events have changed the way I think about church planting. They are causing me to re-think our model.
The trigger point was a comment my wife made over breakfast. I was complaining that we are having a difficult time bouncing back from our most recent church plant. Finally, I concluded that it was really the past five plants that took the wind out of our sails. We aren’t growing any larger—just regaining our numbers after planting a new congregation each autumn.
Four Costs of Planting Churches
My observant wife said it is because you lose, not three (as I always say) but four ingredients each time you plant a church. “You lose people, cash-flow, part of the leadership base and passion,” observed the faithful wife. She went on to say, “The most passionate people are usually the newest converts—their passion drives them to want to help plant a new church. The transfer members always stay with you. You are gradually turning our congregation into a church of dispassionate transplants.”
I couldn’t help my sometimes chauvinistic self. I had to admit that she was right. We bleed passion every time we plant a new church. And it doesn’t come back all that easily.
When we launch a new church, our attendance statistics usually (though not always) take a brief dip. But, within a couple of weeks we are right back where we were before the launch date. The offerings take a little longer to heal. Say, until the next of our annual tithing series. Leadership is much slower to develop. Once we started a large congregation with most of the young urban professionals in our church. It was four years before we healed the leadership deficit they left behind.
Leaking Away Passion
But, what about passion? I hadn’t considered the possibility that we ever lost any. In fact, we usually make such a big deal about the birth of a baby church that you might think we were more passionate in the aftermath. But we aren’t. At least not this year.
Passion is an odd thing. It is very hard to conjure. Seems to be more of a work of the Spirit in the life of a believer. And it is true that new Christians possess more of it than veterans and certainly more than those who joined our church because they were burned out somewhere else. Passion is a precious commodity.
My original comments about not “bouncing back” were evidence of a lack of passion. In the early days, we would give away a huge crowd and still see net numerical growth at the end of the year. That is because, as a young church, we were still brimming over with passion and most of our members were first generation Christians.
That is no longer true. We’ve planted so many churches that we have sifted a lot of passion right out of our midst.
So, “What are we to do?” We don’t want to quit planting churches. We believe it is part of the New Testament mandate. It is the only way the apostles ever did anything that approximated delivery on the great commission. Our task is simply to find a more efficient way to do the job. We must build a method that protects passion while it continues to rapidly launch new churches.
So how can we cut some of these costs? I am especially interested in dealing with the drain in the area of passion. Without it we are dead in the water. I am not interested in pasturing a church in maintenance mode, even if it pops out a new congregation each year. Our problem is that for several years we have multiplied our congregation by one or two churches per year, but we only grow enough to replenish our numbers before we do it again. We think we need to lower the cost of planting new churches.
A Bit of Friendly Advice
I brought up these concerns to a circle of seasoned church planters I met with recently. I had the privilege of hosting a meeting of pastors who had not only planted the churches they pastor, but they had launched multiple congregations during their tenure.
In that meeting I discovered a paradigm that I had not only overlooked, but had disdained over the years. Most of these churches limit the number of people they allow a planter to take with them.
I guess I am still a 1970s hippy at heart. The idea of limiting the size of the team has always smacked of too much “establishment control” over the process.
Frankly I was taken back when I heard the controls these churches put on the church planting process. But then I began to think about the controls attendant to the process of human birth. Only two parents are allowed into the process. Furthermore, the hospital severely limit the number of people in the birth room. Thinking that allowed me to accept the limitations that my friends put on the process of birthing churches.
Limiting the Number Of People You Send
Each of these pastors had a different formula for the number of people they send on a church planting team. The numbers ranged from a handful to fifty. The middle ground of twenty to thirty was most common. This is in stark contrast to the generosity that has ruled our congregations for the past thirty-one years. Four times we’ve given away twenty percent of our congregation. The number crept up to twenty-five percent when we planted two churches on the same day.
What struck me about these pastors was their determination to control numbers in order to protect the mother church. They likened the loss of too many people to the loss of blood a new mother can face while bringing a little kid into the world. Each of them set a quota on the number of people a planter could recruit from the mother church. Most of them asked the planter to show them a regularly updated list of who they were recruiting. All of this necessary if the planter wanted the blessing and financial support of the mother church.
Limiting the Loss of Leadership
Overall numbers are one thing. The loss of key leaders is another. One church planter I know intentionally targeted the strongest lay leaders in the church that sponsored him. He was almost haughty in his approach. Of course, he showed great disdain for the church that brought him to Christ. The pastors I spoke with simply would not allow that to happen.
With their lists, they could regulate the mix of who went out to the new church. They require planters to recruit a wide mix of leaders, followers and new Christians. They actually discuss who will be invited before the invitation is made. They make trade-offs., “You can take this one if you leave me that one…” It sounds like the NFL draft but it works.
Limiting a Financial Burden
It costs money to fund new churches. Mother churches invest it in two ways, not just one. They give away the money they budget to directly invest in the project. They also give money in the form of the tithers they send along with the new pastor. This is a hidden cost. It is also, by far, the larger cost.
Again, the pastors I met with limit this cost. First by limiting the overall number of folks who leave the church they constrain the cost to the mother. But they also negotiate the number of strong givers who will be invited into the project. One man told me that he found a mature staffer pouring over the tithe records of his church. The guy was building a list of the strongest donors in the church. That would have been his recruitment list if he hadn’t been caught. The parent church pastor not only made him destroy the list, he held him back from planting until his character caught up with his calling.
Limiting Your Loss of Passion
The most passionate people in any church are usually found in the ranks of the intensely involved and of the newest converts. The intensely involved are usually leaders so manipulating team lists obviously covers them.
New converts are something else. No one can know how they will fare as leaders or givers until they’ve been around awhile. In some cases, a planting pastor wouldn’t even know them because they are new enough in the church. How do you recruit them? Or, how do you recruit them with any sense of strategy? The pastors I talked with said they encouraged church planters to leave the gleaning of new converts for public announcements.
This strategy calls for a blitz of the mother church two weeks before the church planting team leaves. At this point, anyone who wants to join them can do so. Many who do will be those new Christians who are brimming with passion. Leaving them out of the process until the last minute guarantees that you don’t lose a strong part of the passion base in the parent church.
In other words, don’t recruit them to the team meetings. Keep that for the people whose performance you can predict.
A Final Thought
Most of the pastors I met with will only allow a planter to recruit people from the parent church if they already have an established relationship with them. In other words, “If you didn’t pastor them while you were here, I won’t allow you to pastor them elsewhere.” Of course this can’t apply to those who might come because of a public announcement. But it is good advice. After all this thing called “church” is above all supposed to be about relationships.
Looking back to the meeting and my thoughts going in, I think I learned a lot that day. I learned that you can keep things more relational by being a little institutional. I also learned some great strategies for limiting the losses we take when multiplying our congregation. I haven’t worked it into a strategy for our church, but you can bet that I soon will. "
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