Would it surprise you if I told you that pastors and churches that have a conviction to collaborate with other pastors and churches end up planting more churches than those who don’t?
It’s true, and Christ Together measured it.
Using a national survey that included a baseline of over 2,700 churches who are not connected to the vision of the Christ Together network, and comparing those to over 600 churches who are, we were able to ask specific questions about convictions around collaboration and what actions resulted. More on the results in a moment.
First, some context. Christ Together is a national network that exists to see the whole church take the whole gospel to the whole nation. Working city by city in over 100 cities in the U.S. since 2012, Christ Together has been echoing a call to gospel saturation in every city in our nation.
What exactly is gospel saturation? It is the outcome of the church in a city mobilizing each believer to live in such a way that every man, woman, and child in that city would have repeated opportunities to hear and see the gospel of Jesus Christ.
How do you even begin to get at such a huge vision?
At minimum, it will require a shared conviction that:
- Jesus only has ONE church in a city. There are many congregations, but only one church.
- Only when the church mobilizes each member of the Body of Christ to live and speak as witnesses of Jesus do we have a chance to reach every man, woman, and child in that city.
- Unity among the pastors and congregations of the One Church is the missing apologetic the lost world needs to see according to Jesus’s own words recorded in John 17.
- The responsibility for a geography given to the Church by Jesus in Acts 1:8 must be owned by the leaders and congregations in a city.
That’s the heartbeat of Christ Together—a vision for gospel saturation that changes the operating system of a church from just a “Collecting Community” to a “Mobilizing Community.” And as you can imagine, a natural outcome of such a vision would be planting new churches in order to saturate the geography with Jesus’s people.
Now, what about the survey results?
Let me give you three key highlights followed by four important takeaways.
3 Key Highlights of the Survey:
- The baseline group of 2,700 church leaders reported that, on average, they would collaborate with a pastor or leader of another church only two times a year. For the Christ Together churches, it was over six times per year.
- In the baseline group, only seven out of 100 churches said they viewed collaborating with other churches as a missional necessity. In the Christ Together churches, it was 96 out of 100.
- In the baseline group, 9% of churches actively planted another church in the last three years (with eight out of 10 not planting any). In the Christ Together churches, 48% actively planted a church in the last three years (with nearly a quarter planting at least three churches in the last three years).
