It’s been a while since my last post. Hopefully, I’m choosing quality over quantity, but that may well be just my illusion. You decide.
I spoke recently with some of the most kingdom minded guys I have ever met about their plans for growing their church. They had admittedly jumped a little impulsively into multi-site and were now thinking the best solution was simply to plant as many independent churches as possible. And they were making this decision from a very humble position. That is, they didn’t want it to be about them or their church, they wanted it to be about the kingdom.
Absolutely admirable. In practice however, I think this thinking may be flawed. In order to be the center of a great church planting network, I think you have to set a great example of how to grow. By grow, I mean grow the maturity and number of believers in your vicinity, whether through attractional or missional or other means. And, if you grow, sooner or later one site may not hold you. If one site does not hold you, then you can continually multiply in to independent entities or you can multiply into a multi-site entity.
Growing through the same entity enables you to better preserve the very DNA of your church which has presumably allowed it to prevail. If you choose the multi-site path, you can still plant independent churches. In fact, you should. And, importantly, you can now show them how to grow effectively through your own multi-site efforts. Granted, I am biased. It is what we at North Point have decided to do.
For more on our strategy to pursue both multi-site AND church planting, see the Downloads section of this blog. You can download a talk I did at our conference, Drive ‘09, about this.
July 27, 2009 at 5:29 pm |
It’s a very interesting discussion, David! What do you think about growth through M&A? I think this could be the next trend in “multiplication” for the church world!
July 27, 2009 at 5:45 pm |
Great comment, Ben. You can grow both a campus network and a church planting network through acquisition. Life Church has published their work in acquiring campuses. But, if a church planting network did not plant a church, how can they acquire an already-planted church? The nurturing of a planted church takes years. A church planting network can meaningfully acquire (adopt?) an already-planted church into its network.