SURVEY SAID......

In the days ahead, the results will be widely published from the landmark survey of American church planters sponsored by Lifeway.  The UMC and several major denominations participated in the study.  We will be able to break it down regionally and learn volumes about the nature of conventional church planting in the USA.  By conventional, I mean those plants that function with a salaried pastor and seek to launch public worship in the first few months, and to attract tithing members who financially bankroll the young church.

I have seen just the first release of data - and being a data nerd, I will dig deeper in the months ahead.  But already, a few things are clear.:

1. American church plants tend to be small.  The median size ranges from region to region, but the range is not enormous.  The median first year church plant averages 30 people in worship, all groups and denominations factored in. In year two, that rises into the 40s.  Most plants never break 100 in the first four years.

2. There are fewer African American and Hispanic churches making the bar for financial sustainability, ostensibly due to the lower incomes in many such communities. This is a justice issue - in that our financial model of expensive church in America is now inhibiting our evangelization in black and Hispanic communities.  Unacceptable.  You can bet Path 1 will be thinking deeply about this. The solution cannot simply be throwing more money at such plants, which only encourages dependency and sets up churches for failure when the financial subsidies are eventually cut.

3. The church plants that fare the best are very PUBLIC in their community presence.  They may not be able to afford land on a major intersection, but they are spending resources to stay in the middle of the public traffic flow, and in the public conversation.  They are high profile in everything they do. Simply meeting in a public school correlates with much larger worship attendance in the early months.  (Correlation is not causality - as all of you know who have had to close church plants meeting in schools.)

4. The plants that thrive find financial independence early and they multiply sooner rather than later.  (I will check the data further, but anecdotally I see many planting next campuses before they are fully in the black on the first one - multiplication is in their DNA).  Telling churches that they are not old enough or big enough to multiply is a really bad habit by many denominational committees and leaders.

5.Good pastoral salaries bode well for the plant.   This may seem counter-intuitive, since success correlates with solvency.  But good pastoral compensation also correlates.  In other words, the churches that thrive pay their pastors well, and also raise the internal streams of income to pay for this cost early rather than later.

One additional thought, not in the report - in very tough planting zones, there is often a season of advance work, relationship development time, sometimes lasting into years before it is time to kick into full church planting mode.  You can start too fast, and begin blowing money out the door, when a planter does not even know her or his community well at all yet. Finding ways to help the planter get rooted in neighborhood and establish a team before the church plant begins its public march toward worship launch is a critical best practice!

Want to discover more? Click  HERE for their first report.

I look forward to unpacking the Lifeway results further and comparing them with what we are learning at Epicenter from our coaching with scores of new faith communities in the USA and Europe.