One of my tasks as Director of Home Missions and Evangelism is to seek encourage, recruit and oversee church planters and church-planting. In my denomination it takes at least twenty-five members to establish a church. Until it reaches that point, it remains a mission church. This seems large compared to many member churches which now have fewer than 10 active members? I believe that it is time to revisit our ecclesiology: a biblical study of what the Bible says about the Church. What is the definition of a church? What size is required for a church? How should a church function? What leadership does a church need?

It is time to face the brutal facts of church-planting. The first one is that most churches that are planted will never be larger than 75 attenders. Many church planters envision large churches of 100-200, some even 1,000+. Yet the average church in America is around 75. Many hover around 15-20. There aren’t enough tithing members in these small churches to sustain a physical plant and full-time pastor at the same time. The ones that can have gotten there after they paid off their building and may have other investments to help supplement their income. In most areas of the country it will take 70-80 members to do this.

This means that we will need a large number of bi-vocational leaders to serve the Church. The traditional model of church is very expensive and difficult to sustain. While it will take leaders with the spiritual gifts, personality, work ethic, and interpersonal skills to grow larger than average churches, it only takes average people to start and lead churches that average 10-40.

The second thing to consider is this: the church-planting model most often proposed is very expensive to implement. First, it is costly to identify where to plant a church. Paying a church planter to locate in the selected area, do outreach, and build a team takes capital. The team most often put together first is a worship team to cater to the modern audience. People who attend come to enjoy the services and benefit from the pastoral care. So the professionalization of the ministry leads to high quality services, but often encourages passivity among the laity. Mobilizing and unleashing the laity is the greatest need in church-planting. If the goal is to evangelize and disciple people, there are less costly, more effective ways to do this.

Third, we want to plant churches that see the need to plant churches. They become the base for other church plants. Instead of seeking to build churches that have centripetal forces at work, where the goal is to find and keep as many people together as possible, we want to plant churches with a centrifugal force working in them, where people are trained and thrust out for ministry. Centripetal forces offer little incentive for a pastor or church to send out church members into multiplying new (yet small) congregations.

The very life and health of our churches now depend upon attracting and keeping as many new, or old, believers as possible. The financing of salaries, programs, and overhead conspire to force us to draw as many people as possible into the fold to maintain the church. Where centrifugal forces are at work, people feel compelled by the Holy Spirit to engage in ministry work, to move out of their comfort zones, and to go and get involved in where God is working, and are encouraged by church leaders to do so.

There are objections to the planting of new churches. Given the fact that most small churches with aging members will die because they have followed the centripetal approach and grown inward, they still maintain that we have enough churches already. All we have to do is help the churches we have to prosper. A related concern is that, by planting new churches, we will create competition for existing churches and bring them down. Those of us who want to plant new churches must accept the fact that we are swimming against a powerful current of those who want to keep growing their existing churches (even when those churches are not growing).

The model that I am proposing involves grounded Christians starting Bible studies with their unchurched or unbelieving friends and neighbors in their homes. This removes the cumbersome expense of overhead. This model also spreads the work around, engaging fellow believers in the tasks of evangelism and discipleship. It also allows for fellowship and the practice of the reciprocal commands (one another commands). This model comes from the book of Acts, where people who were led to Jesus were gathered into homes or small groups and discipled.