More on Church Planting in the GMC!

Steve Cordle made a comment on my previous post about Church Planting in the GMC.  Steve, for those who do not know, is the pastor of Crossroads Church, outside Pittsburgh.  He is one of the best church planters there is… having planted Crossroads in the early 90s, leading it to plant many, many churches.  He is the leader of the River Network, the group coordinating the Global Methodist Church’s church planting strategy.  Steve commented that the statistic I gave, that a denomination needs to annually plant 3% of its total number of churches if it intends to grow is outdated.  The new understanding is that 3% is needed to simply maintain the denomination!

SO WHAT YOU’RE SAYING, STEVE, IS WE NEED TO PLANT EVEN MORE CHURCHES?

Don’t threaten me with a good time, pal!

There will be at least 5,000 GMC churches by the end of the year.  There may already be that many. That means we need 150 new churches.

GET SOME!!

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I sometimes think if I know something, you know it, too! Like, it’s been on my mind, so of course I told you all this before… or I forget which group I told what… So let me give you the run down of where we are in Kentucky.

I mentioned the three churches that have sprung up in the wake of churches that did not disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church.

Here is where we are in terms of church planting, in addition to the churches I mentioned in the previous post.

Matt Abel launched a house church at the beginning of the year, asking God to lead it into a group of house churches spreading across Northern Kentucky.

Trinity Hill has gotten more intentional about outreach to our neighbors… we are reaching out, praying, and discerning to see if there is a possibility for a church in an apartment complex nearby.

Jim Wofford, a recently retired UMC pastor, is starting a house church network, also in Northern Kentucky.  It’s a cool story—Jim is one of my favorite pastors.  His son, Austin, is leading a house church network in Lexington.  Austin has written an interesting book, “Forged,” about this kind of work with emerging adults.  Jim is taking a page from his son’s book and ministry experience, and launching into something new.

One couple is discerning about starting a new church way outside of Kentucky.  We want to support that, too!  This is not a local thing, and in fact, we will need to be serious about supporting church plants in the Western part of the U.S.

There are at least 4 other new churches in various stages of development.  So, I guess I should say we are at 5 churches started, 5 in the hopper.  That is 6% of our 78 churches.  But as I said, the number of GMC churches in Kentucky will grow significantly by the end of the year.  We are going to have to run hard to stay ahead.

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I am totally stoked that because of an amazingly generous gift, I am able to take Ben Palmer and Jacob Wilson with me to the Multipliers Operating System,  three 2-day seminars in different churches who are doing the work of multiplication.  The Multipliers Operating System is an Exponential Learning Community.  The cohort we will be in is for the GMC! We will be there with Ralph Moore, the best multiplying church leaded in America.

Let’s say that the 10 churches that are in various stages of development now each plant a church within 3 years.  In addition to whatever other churches we plant, we will have 20 churches, which would be more than 3% of the number of churches we will likely need to plant.  If we can embed church multiplication—churches planting churches that plant churches—we will far outstrip the rate at which we need to plant churches just to maintain.  God will bless us with amazing growth!

So, I will ask again: please pray with me that God will send workers into His harvest field.