Multiply!

Tomorrow, we are having an important meeting at our church, called “The Multiply! Event.”  Steve Cordle, pastor of Crossroads Church in Pittsburgh, will be leading two sessions.  The first will be on effective, multiplying small groups, and how they can be used to plant more churches.  The second session will be on how churches can partner together to plant new churches.  It’s an idea called “Friends on Mission.”  The goal is for pastors to get together for fellowship and encouragement, and to pool resources to plant new churches.

2017 was a very important year for the church in America.  For the first time in anyone’s living memory, we opened more churches than we closed.  Every year, for decades, about 3000 churches closed annually. New churches were started, obviously, but never as many as closed.  But that changed in 2017, and it is in no small part due to the Exponential church planting conference (check it out: exponential.org).

You have heard me talk about “Levels” of churches before.

Level 1: declining

Level 2: plateaued

Level 3: growing

Level 4: reproducing; these churches have started a new church or satellite campus

Level 5: multiplying; these churches have planted churches that have planted churches.

Level 1 and 2 are 80% of churches in America

Level 3: used to be 16%, now 13%... and this is good because…

Level 4 used to be 4% now is 7%.  This is where the growth in new churches started comes from.

There are not enough Level 5 churches to register.  Hope Chapel in Honolulu is pretty much the only one.  Church Multiplication Associates is a network that is blowing up, but hard to pin down as a church.

The church statisticians tell us that if we can sustain 10% of churches at Level 4, we will see massive growth of the Kingdom of God in America.  To be fair, they do not talk about this in terms of numbers, they talk about in terms of revival.

I think the next few years are going to be very exciting as we see more and more churches, more and more pastors giving their best effort not to just growing by adding more members than they lose, but actually moving towards reproducing.

One of these days, when you say, “I really want to move towards reproduction and multiplication,” let me know! We can talk… and we can get you to another “Multiply! Event.”