Factor 5: The Church Planting Resurgence.
The church heroes of the baby-boom generation were the megachurch pastors. Today, they are the church planters.
When I started thinking about multisiting in the early 1990s, I thought it would be sort of like church planting, but different. So I went and bought all the church planting books available, all three of them. Not only were there not many books about church planting, the few that were available were either written by researchers who had never started a church themselves or by individuals who were successful church planters in the 1950s.
Today, there are about three books a month published about church planting from successful practitioners. Starting new churches is the new cool!
In the past, local churches gave money to their denominations or networks and their denomination or network started churches. Today, local churches still give money to their denominations and networks, but increasingly, local churches are planting churches as well. Local pastors and churches are passionately embracing the responsibility of starting new congregations. Not a few of them are creating networks of reproducing churches through multisiting and church planting. Some of them are becoming movements that are driven by a local church instead of a national denominational headquarters.
These new church planters are less inclined toward building super-mega campuses, but will multisite and repurpose existing buildings. When they do build facilities, they will be smaller (under 1,500 seats) and multipurpose with multiple venues that are community and environmentally friendly.
Shift: The church planting resurgence is retrofitting existing commercial facilities and will build smaller church facilities with multiple venues.
