The Pitfalls of Church Planting
While NAMB’s convention report is encouraging, the road of a church plant is not easy.
Ron Jacobs writing for Pastors.com raised a caution that will get the attention of entrepreneurially-motivated young pastors.
“Church planting organizations and networks like ARC, Church Multiplication Network, NAMB, New Thing Network, Converge, Launch Group, Acts29, Stadia, etc., made it easier to start new church plants than ever before.
“Conferences like Exponential and countless books and websites arose during the second wave to further build the church planter ecosystem.
“But it’s not enough to launch a startup or plant a church…they must succeed. And in this regard the numbers are not heartening.
“Coca-Cola VP of Innovation David Butler writes, ‘Ninety percent of all startups still fail.’
“According to NAMB research, about a third, 33 percent of church plants, won’t survive past the fourth year and the average size of those churches was just over 80 people.”
James Emery White, the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, makes a similar connection between starting a business and launching a church.
“Every year, over 1 million people in this country start a business. Forty percent of them will close by the end of the first year. Within five years, more than 80 percent of them will fail. Of the 20 percent that make it past the first five years, 80 percent won’t make it past the second five.
“The statistics are about the same for new churches, and church-planting studies with denominations bear this out.”
And there are outright critics of church planting. One is Dr. Randy White, the pastor at Taos First Baptist Church. He wrote last year, “What we are not told is that new churches have an unbelievably high failure rate, often do not survive the loss of the founder or those with the founding vision, and cost far more per member than established churches. We are not told that existing churches could stretch the same dollars many times more than the quick-spend of church planting money. We are not told of the multi-millions of dollars that have been squandered on ill-conceived church plants.”
Entrepreneurial young leaders are undaunted by the cautions and criticisms. They’re asking themselves “how do I grow something big?”
“If we can start more and more of the communities that are doing the stuff that God meant for us to do,” Dave Ferguson told Jason Daye, host of the ChurchLeaders podcast, “The social justice stuff, the evangelistic stuff, the belonging and being community stuff, the getting through everything that life brings them stuff, there’s no more important work in the world.”
Paul and Barnabas would likely agree.
