Hey! As an Evangelical Christian whose church sends out church plants fairly regularly, I appreciated the basically sympathetic outside-in view of ourselves. Love this: "The role of a pastor is to enable Jesus to take as many shots on goal as possible."
If I could add a bit of extra perspective:
- At least in my circles of Evangelicalism, having a seminary degree is absolutely seen as a must. I'm happy to believe there are other circles where it's not as important.
- In addition to "convergent evolution", there is a lot of explicit cross-pollination. I took a one-credit seminary course (see?) on "Philosophy of Ministry", and the lecturer repeatedly referenced the organizational framework from the book "Barbarians to Bureaucrats", which is explicitly about corporate lifecycle. I've read lots of books about church-planting and mission that clearly have influence from the corporate world, and lots of books about business that clearly have Christian influences.
- Re launching with a "support team" from the sending church: I think you're pretty close to the mark. There's a massive amount of logistics required to run a service: set-up, tear-down, electrical, audio, music, coffee, food etc etc etc; and of course that doesn't count things like accounting, legal, secretarial, social media, website, graphic design, and everything else needed to run a small organization. Having a team of enthusiastic people doing all that work for free is a huge help. So is, as you say, having a core of enthusiastic people listening to you preach every Sunday. Imagine the difference between standing up to preach maybe only having a dozen strangers, or maybe nobody at all, vs knowing you're going to have a minimum of 15-20 supportive and enthusiastic listeners. And of course, just personally giving good advice and being encouraging.
- To some degree the "creative destruction" thing is straight from Jesus: "If the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It's good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot." "The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire." He tells a story about a guy who goes around throwing seed everywhere; most don't end up producing much fruit for various reasons, but a few do.
If there's one weakness of the piece, it's the sort of implication about the percentage of narcissists. You state that it's the sort of job that would be attractive to narcissists, which is certainly true. And it's undeniable that narcissists occasionally end up in positions of power (Mars Hill is a great example). But there's sort of an unstated implication, therefore, that a high percentage of people (though unspecified) in church plants are narcissists, because you don't see anything in particular preventing it.
There are several filters; the big one being that it's just a lot of work. You're expected to work long hours, be humble, put up with all kinds of criticism, be willing to do low-level service, etc etc. You're going to have a hard time doing your plant without that initial "support team", and you're going to have a hard time finding an enthusiastic "support team" without playing the role. There are, on the whole, far easier ways to run your petty kingdom than by doing a church plant.
Which isn't to say it doesn't happen. From what I know, cancer-like mutations which cause unlimited cell growth happen all the time; after all, uniform cooperation of every cell in the body is an evolutionarily unstable equilibrium. But the body has mechanisms to detect and counter these. What we call cancer only occurs when a mutation has managed to evade the body's defenses. I think a similar process has happened when a genuine narcissist's church plant gains significant traction.
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1I don't know a lot about church planters, but I do know a lot about startup founders and I overwhelmingly associate higher narcissism with longer hours and harder work.
There definitely is a category of lifestyle entrepreneur who wants to work as little as possible and is just hanging out for the image, but those people tend to be relatively non-neurotic social climbers who want to have a good time.
The real hardcore narcissists tend towards maximalism and masochism in their startups. They walk the halls whipping themselves so that others in the startup economy may admire how committed they are to the mission. Every project is as intense as they are, and must be executed as if its outcome has lasting consequences for the human race.
This kind of intensity has great ergonomics for narcissism - the pain and difficulty in conjunction with a great and important mission feeds the self-image of greatness in a way that a great and important mission alone does not.
One of my hopes for this piece was that evangelicals who read it would feel respected and seen, so I'm delighted to hear I succeeded. I also appreciate the inside info and push back.
3I'm not an evangelical (anymore), but am sort of a missionary kid - my family moved to Poland explicitly to do church building (after seeing how much of a pagan wasteland it is - fun!). This was to a very evangelical denomination, where the official name is "Free Christians". For legal reasons there's a counsel that in theory has authority over all the branch churches, but no one cares about what they think. In these circles having a seminary degree was viewed sort of negatively. Not explicitly so, but it was viewed with suspicion. Studying theology was sort of frowned upon, as they're more likely to lead you astray.
TBF I have friends from other denominations where you do need a degree of some kind to be respected, so it's very denomination dependent. I get the feeling that the more America influenced churches care more about credentials (Baptists, Pentecostals). It's correlated with how much structure and levels of authority there are.
1I grew up in fundamentalist circles and was in (foreign) church plants for ~5 years of my life.
- The founder is very young, often under 25.
- He might work alone or with a founding team, but when he tells the story of the founding it will always have him at the center.
- He has no credentials for this business.
Founders at foreign plants are usually older, typically in their 30s or 40s. Some are even in their 50s or 60s, arriving as empty nesters. Supporter attrition is extremely high; our church turned over about every ~2 years. About 50% of foreign missionaries leave after 2 years, another 1/2 of the remaining leave after 4, and another 1/2 after 7 years. So only about 1/8 of people stay long-term at one of these harder plants that take about 10 years to start. So many fail before they even truly get underway, especially in the most hostile areas. Mission orgs almost always try to send a team to a new area, because planting is extremely lonely and isolating. When the pastors I met talk about the history of the church, they often mention other planters etc. and give themselves a much lower profile (seems reasonable that podcast guests aren't representative of the pastor at one of these plants).
Not all foreign missionaries are seminary-educated, but most pastors are regardless of denomination. Many were actively involved in the church, had some sort of sending/validation by other members, and some were even pastors of their former church. Churches usually start in living rooms and there's often no church building that you could take over. Oftentimes you rent space from a building; during the week you can use it as an office or something.
Generally unconcerned with negative externalities
This wasn't my experience; many people expressed sadness/wishes that scandals like Mars Hill didn't happen. Leadership also take precautions against causing scandals etc., but each plant varies but most in foreign places are fairly upright and try to do good in general.
The most useful function [of a mission team] mentioned was mowing the pastor’s own lawn, to free up his time.
Mission teams are often criticized for their effectiveness even within Christian circles because they take a lot of resources from the hosting church (providing food, place to sleep, spend time with them, etc.) and the output is often manual labor/construction instead of trying to build relationships with locals because of time constraints or language barriers. It's sometimes comforting for the receiving church though; it can be lonely at a plant. An argument for mission teams is that it "strengthens the faith" of the people going and they forge closer relationships with each other, which leads to lower attrition rates from the church on the margin.
1The comparison between Church founders and Startup founders is accurate. In startup communities, The Purpose Driven Church is a well known manual for building startup culture, attracting dedicated employees, and raising capital. I know more than one founder who claims it was by far the most useful book for creating their company, beating out all the books that are literally about creating startups.
1Curated. One of the most surprising posts I've read in a long time, reading that a bunch of my models from startups could apply to this domain that I have known so little about and expected was so alien. I suspect, if no comment is to convincingly argue that this is gravely mistaken – and I would've been more sus about it had I not read this comment by Evangelical Christian gwm – that this has helped bridge a cultural divide that I (and many others) had little chance of bridging any other way.
1Great post and analogy! I grew up in Evangelicalism, spent most of my 20s and 30s in it, and even attempted to become a missionary at one point. This post tracks pretty closely to what I observed.
I’d say that as far as education goes, yes you don’t have to have a ministry degree at first, but it’s expected that you’ll seek some sort of ministry education. (Maybe after that four year mark.) This is increasingly done through online-only programs. Sometimes they’re bachelor’s degrees, frequently they’re just certificate programs. They’re always marketed as programs that “fit the busy schedules of full-time pastors.”
On support teams, while this varied a bit from pastor to pastor, I never felt like church planters were insincere in their appreciation for volunteer efforts. Especially when it came to anything for the Sunday morning service itself.
But for the behind the scenes stuff (website, finance team, administrative support, etc…) there was definitely tension. Lots of big ideas with poor follow-through. Maybe a bit like product managers who insist someone else is the responsible “product owner,” many pastors do want to leave all the homework for somebody else to do.
1Hi - venture capitalist here! Great post, but am mostly curious about the financial side of an operation like this.
Most important: Returns (I am in VC after all)
- Is financial return at all important to the funders? If so, how does that work, cash comes in the form of donations, some of which results in profit, some of which is returned to funders as dividends (so more of a long-term buy-and-hold strategy)?
- Or is it rather more VC like, in the sense that money is only made once the church is sold to other denominations or 'scaling specialists'? (So cash only at exit)
- Then the most important, assuming its one of the two above, what then are returns one can expect as a funder? And as a planter? On invested capital (i.e. multiples?)
Second most important: Non-financial returns
- I assume, besides potential financial returns, another important element for funders are non-financial returns, which I assume is quite simply the number of poor sods converted.
- Do funders consider this as a source of non-financial returns, or are they purely there for the money?
- What can one expect in terms of number of people converted per dollar, how much does it usually cost?
Third: Control
- Is the church set up using an ownership structure, and do the funders get shares in that structure?
- Is there control associated with ownership? I.e. can the funders sack the planter but keep the church?
Very interesting article - curious if there's any info on the above!
My sense is that for almost all funders, money is viewed as an input with which to save souls, rather than a terminal goal like it is for VCs. Which isn't to say there aren't financial abuses, but they genuinely feel like a departure from form, rather than especially obvious cases of something everyone is doing.
With non-denominational churches, funders can't sack the planter, they can just decline future funding. It's not impossible they could fund a hostile takeover, but early church plants are such cults of personality with so little in assets that it wouldn't really make sense to do so- you'd rather just found another planter who can start his own cult of personality (who might buy the sound system off a failed plant). As churches get bigger there will generally be a board who might have the power to fire the pastor, and denominational churches are either subject to control by the denomination or have a board with firing power from the beginning.
You should look into a guy called Abraham Vereide. He is almost single handedly responsible for the development of Evangelical Christianism.
He’s the guy who rebranded Fundamentalism as Evangelicalism (via his proxy Billy Graham). He’s also the guy who introduced the multilevel marketing of planting as a business model for Jesus. Soteriological Amway. That’s why the podcasts you’re listening to are so filled with “growth words”. It’s a dodge around talking openly about money.
He’s a really interesting guy. He came to D.C. with FDR, and he stayed in the Oval Office until his death in 1969. The adoption of the National Motto and putting it on the money was his doing. He represented Truman during the drafting of the UN Charter at Dumbarton Oaks and pushed David Ben-Gurion to suggest Israel as the name for the new country (it was going to be Judah. The name Israel was a huge surprise for everyone, even the proto-Israelis). He also founded the National Prayer Breakfast that made religion the gatekeeper of American politics.
It’s near impossible to overstate the scale of Vereide’s influence on the United States. Regardless of how one feels about him, he can’t be overlooked in any thorough examination of Evangelical Christianism.
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1Excellent piece. Having grown up inside the “non-denominational” sphere, I’d say you’re basically spot on with most of your observations. I actually have an old estranged friend who both planted a church and attempted a tech start up.
You mentioned support teams. From my own, albeit limited, observations these people tend to be close members of the pastors small group / men’s group. I think the value is in, yes labor, but mostly emotional support. I’ve found these planter types to be both deeply self obsessed and deeply insecure. Having that constant emotional support / attention / validation is actually probably of great value to them.
1How do you know someone really accepted Christ and isn’t just saying it? What if they do it wrong? Protestants don’t believe in salvation through works, so you can’t even use their behavior as a check.
Hi, Evangelical Christian from across the Atlantic here. Just wanted to point out that the traditional Protestant doctrine of "salvation through faith, not works" does not mean that you cannot use behavior as a check. Based on texts such as Matthew 7.15-23 ("So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit") or James 2.14-26 ("show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works"), many Protestants (and Evangelicals) consider that true faith will necessarily induce personal change leading to "good works". So someone who says they believe but does not exhibit behavioral improvements would not "really know Jesus / have made the handshake".
In the words of John Calvin (who was pretty stuck on salvation by faith alone):
"It is therefore faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone: just as it is the heat alone of the sun which warms the earth, and yet in the sun it is not alone, because it is constantly conjoined with light." (forum where I found the reference, along with several other helpful quotes from Luther and historic Lutheran confessions)
From my understanding, this is the majority view among Protestant theologians in history (and probably today as well). However, the very peculiar Evangelical culture in the US, especially in corners that devalue theological study (as described in the article; often non-denominational), and the simplifications that come with it, have given some prevalence to views such as the one you describe.
Otherwise, I had lots of fun reading this, thank you for making that bridge! I have heard many Christians criticize the start-up mentality of church planting, but its nice getting this from an outside view.
1Hey, thanks for posting this! It was a really interesting read. I do want to add though that church planting is not just a evangelical thing, my family goes to a centuries-old church that is part of is part of the free methodist denomination, and it has sent out multiple church plants over the past couple years. However, the method of planting tends to be somewhat different than what you described. The church has just one main pastor but around 6-7 other pastors, (although they might be called deacons in other denominations). They preach occasionally but mostly help out with one specific thing; for example there is a youth pastor, a communications pastor, and a social justice pastor. Every so often, one of these pastors will, with the support of our church, decide that they would be more fulfilled leading their own church, or that they want to set up a church in an area nearby they see as underserved. When this happens, they typically start a new church some distance away and bring along some families from our church with them. However, because of the way the free methodist denomination works, the new church is in no way subordinate to its parent church and usually grows to be its own separate entity (although the two churches stay close because the original planters still have relationships with the people from our church). Knowing how it is done in the free methodist denomination made this more interesting because of the contrast, so I thought I would provide this for other people to think about the differences!
1I'm from a background with a similar approach - going off to start your own thing from scratch is frowned upon, because it usually just cannibalizes preexisting churches and siphons off the disgruntled etc.
We had a large and fast growing church (over 200 members), with people coming from all around. So every now and then there would be an attempt to choose someone worthy (good preacher, of good standing, cares about people, known to be moral etc.) who lives in a place where there are already a couple of families, and get them to start their own thing with the blessing of the main church. The explicit goal would be for them to be totally self sufficient, though of course they would both stay close (ideally...).
This was in a massively majority Catholic country, so there were very few evangelical churches (official statistics have them as less than 1% of the population). Church growth was supposed to be via proselytization, but was usually via having lots of children and catching fleeing members from other churches.
Very interesting, thank you.
My impression was that Free Methodists are evangelical (although obviously not non-denominational)[1]. Overall it seems like denominational evangelicals fall somewhere in between the non-denominationals and the mainlines. They're more likely to require a seminary degree and have more of a hierarchy. Could you say more about what makes you categorize Free Methodists as non-evangelical?
It may be that the denomination as a whole is classified evangelical, but our specific church definitely doesn't feel like it (Speaking as someone with experience). All the pastors went to seminary, even the youth pastor and the social justice pastor and there is less of an established hierarchy than most evangelical churches. The pastor is not in charge of the church, rather the elected board is, and there is less emphasis on spreading the bible and more on caring for the community that the church is in.
Interesting post. Maybe others have mentioned this, but a difference with startup founders is charisma, as they often lack it (eg tech nerds are famously uncharismatic), though of course it helps.
Also incidentally this post highlights how different the US and UK (and various other western countries) are in their attitude to religion; in the UK church attendance is tiny, and open religiosity is almost universally seen as weird and embarrassing. So this whole church planting thing seems very odd.
Think dolphins evolving the same fins and tail as sharks, despite having bones and needing to breathe air.
I will grant you that dolphins and sharks share the (main) dorsal fin, and I will also grant you that the pectoral fins of sharks and the flippers of dolphins are cases of convergent evolution.
But as far as tails are concerned, cetaceans differ from sharks, most fish, and ichthyosauria in that they have flukes (horizontal fins, like wings on a plane) while the others have caudal fins (vertical). Basically, ceteans generate thrust by moving their tail up and down, while fish (et al) generate thrust by moving their tail left and right.
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I’m going to describe a Type Of Guy starting a business, and you’re going to guess the business:
Hint for those outside the Bay Area and Twitter: at this point you’re supposed to guess “tech start-up”
Hint for those outside the Bay Area and twitter: this is obviously not a tech start-up.
This guy is founding an evangelical church, and I find his ecosystem fascinating. First for its stunning similarities to venture-capital-funded tech start-ups, and then for its simplicity and open-heartedness. None of the dynamics in church planting are unique or even particularly rare, but they are unobfuscated, and that makes church planting the equivalent of a large print book for the social dynamics that favor charismatic narcissists.
My qualifications to speak on church planting are having spent six weeks listening to podcasts by and for church planters, plus a smattering of reading. I expect this is about as informative as listening to venture podcasts is to actual venture capital, which is to say it’s a great way to get a sense of how small players want to be perceived, but so-so at communicating all of what is actually happening. Religion-wise, I also raised in a mainline Protestant denomination, although I left as a teenager. My qualifications to speak on tech start-ups are living in the Bay Area and being on Twitter.*
[*I’ve also been an employee at two start-ups, have angel investor friends, and some of my favorite clients are founders looking for their next thing. But I assure you, going to parties in the bay is sufficient.]
What is Church Planting?
Evangelical Christians are in a bind: they believe that introducing heathens to Jesus is the most important thing they can possibly do, but are fundamentally opposed to the kind of structure that Catholics and mainline Protestant denominations use to support missionaries. Missionaries have a hierarchy they answer to, and one of the things I’ve come to respect about evangelicals is how little use they have for hierarchies and credentials.
How do you spread the Word when you can’t order someone to do it? You decentralize. Church planting is a do-acracy, where young men decide that God has called them to lead a church, and a decentralized network of financiers fund whoever they choose. This man, and perhaps an assisting team, builds a church from the ground up, answering to no one but his funders.
The Planters
We’ve already covered many traits of a planter, but let me give a few more:
Why do I say that church planters tend towards charismatic narcissism?
First, charisma is a bona fide requirement for being a pastor, especially an evangelical pastor who needs to recruit a new flock. This is doubly true for “parachute plants,” in which a planter moves to a new-to-them area and starts a church, knowing no one beyond their support team. Funders would be stupid not to select for the ability to make people like you and support your goals, and if they somehow were that stupid, the uncharismatic ones would lose in the marketplace (another way in which planting culture embodies American virtues: their embrace of creative destruction). Similarly, VCs like founders who are the subject of positive pieces in trade journals, not because they think those articles have any factual content, but because the skills to get those articles written about oneself have other uses.
Second, planters are selected for a lack of self-doubt. It takes a special kind of 24-year-old to think, “Hundreds of people should pay me for my advice on the most important topic in existence every week,” and those who do will trend towards narcissism.
Third, the job is more rewarding and less taxing for narcissists (and extroverts). Lead pastor is an incredibly social job, requiring numerous 1:1 interactions and performing in front of a hopefully large group.
When I first started this investigation, I expected this push towards charisma and narcissism to be countered by the demand that church planters have strong moral character. Surely planters were selected by wise elders, who’d known them for years and seen them be noble under difficult circumstances. And many places do at least pay lip service to that ideal. But the very first checklist I found for assessing church planters had a noticeable absence of demand for even self-assessed character, much less an appraiser with deep knowledge of the potential founder. 80% of the questions focused on ability to conceive a grand vision and get people to go along with it.
This deeply violates my sense of what organized religion should be, and my lack of participation in organized religion in no way lessens my feelings of entitlement to see it done the way I want. But the fact that anyone can be a pastor is another facet of evangelicalism that accords with the virtues of America. No one can tell you you can’t found a Bible-teaching church. They can decline to fund you or attend, or if they really hate you perhaps write some mean things in a newsletter. But if one funder declines, you can always try another, and another. You just have to believe in your grand vision hard enough (which will select for narcissists).
The Goals
The goal of a church planter (and their funders) is to introduce more people to Jesus. I use the word “introduce” quite literally here; it’s much more like trying to introduce two friends at a party and get them to shake hands than trying to get a friend to read a life-changing book, or introducing them to the ineffable presence of my childhood church. This is one of the biggest differences between evangelical and mainline Protestants- they both talk about both Jesus and God, but for evangelicals the emphasis is on the former, and for mainlines the latter.
Church planters take their goal of Jesus handshakes very, very seriously, considering it the most important biblical commandment. This makes a ton of sense if you accept their belief that the handshake is the difference between eternity in hell and eternity in heaven. Given the importance of saving souls, merely founding and growing a church isn’t enough; You need to grow large and plant churches that themselves grow large and plant more churches. You need to be disciplemaxxing at all times. Leaderboards track the churches that are the largest and fastest-growing (baptisms is another area of competition, although I didn’t find a leaderboard for it).
This philosophy bugged me a lot because why is a handshake (or as they would put it, knowing Jesus Christ and accepting him as your savior) sufficient? How do you know someone really accepted Christ and isn’t just saying it? What if they do it wrong? Protestants don’t believe in salvation through works, so you can’t even use their behavior as a check. And what if a bad Christian nonetheless recruits more people to the Jesus party? Their recruits will never even have a chance at doing it right.
An ex-evangelical friend explained the reasoning as follows: as long as someone is coming to the party and shaking hands with Jesus, there’s a chance for them to get a handshake firm enough to accept him into their heart. But if they’re not even attempting to live as a Christian, Jesus can’t make inroads. The role of a pastor is to enable Jesus to take as many shots on goal as possible. Which again, makes sense once you accept their premises.
The Funders
Lots of charismatic narcissists and young idiots have grand visions for themselves, but only certain ecosystems systematically support those dreams. If we want to understand church planting and environments like it, we need to look at the people who are actually making it happen, i.e., the funders.
We’re talking about nondenominational churches, which leaves four sources of funding:
Like venture capital, funding from 1+2 is often pledged and released in stages based on meeting milestones. Milestones might be acquiring a new space, attendance, or finding additional funders. They will often have some ideological requirements, like complementarianism (men and women are spiritually equal but called to different roles) or cessationism (the belief that the Holy Spirit no longer enables humans to do miracles).
Churches and sending networks will often provide other support along with their funding, more like incubators than traditional VC. This can include classes, apprenticeships, support groups, and the same for the wife you definitely already have (being a planter’s wife sounds like all of the downside with none of the upside, more on this later).
Funding can be anything from six months of partial expenses to fully covering four years of expenses- but very rarely go beyond four years. At four years you are expected to be self-sufficient and ideally have started nurturing your daughter church plants (which every planter lists as their goal), because if you don’t do it by year five you never will.
Much like venture capital, church planting is a hits-based business. Funders expect most of their plants to fail, and of those that succeed, they expect most successes to be modest. You make your investment back on the 1 in 100 founding that becomes a unicorn (or mega church). However success rates vary by funder; one church claimed 14/14 successes for their high-touch spawning process, and people on the patreon model are most likely to fail.
The Human Cost
The worst case scenario for a church plant is something like Mars Hill Church, where a pastor built a successful megachurch with a tightknit community, only to abuse his authority and destroy the church*. At best, this cost members their spiritual home and a community they had come to count on. At worst, they were so badly traumatized they could no longer have a relationship with God. This doesn’t seem that surprising when you’re led by a 25 year old who (untruthfully) brags that he went from heathen to intended pastor with no stops inbetween.
[*Mars Hill was funded via a friends and family round but received substantial advice and encouragement from the Acts29 network, so I think it’s fair to use it to assess the judgement of the decentralized leadership]
Similarly, I hate how little Silicon Valley pays attention to externalities. I don’t mean the creative destruction via things like Waymo replacing drivers, I mean advice like “advertise two features and implement the one that more people click on,” or “build your fintech business on sex workers and then kick them out once you’re big enough.” Users’ time and energy are treated as free goods. The benefits to users might sometimes outweigh the costs, but I never get the sense anyone is doing that math.
The Life Cycle
Once a man has decided to plant a church, a common starting point is hosting a bible study in his home, but some plants skip this step and go straight to Sunday services. The first step to holding Sunday Services is to find a location. My sense is that if you get a bunch of early-stage pastors together, this is what they complain about. You want somewhere that’s available at prime church time, has seating and A/C, feels like a church, and costs little. The dream is finding a 7th Day Adventist church (who hold their services on Saturday). Movie theaters are not common but pastors who use them seem happier than those in school gyms and hotel conference centers, because it spares them two hours setting up speakers and folding chairs.
The standard advice is to start with “preview services” to draw some interest locally and work out the bugs. Then you do an official launch service that will draw lots of people, mostly existing Christians and your supportive friends. You’re considered successful if your regular attendance reaches half of your launch attendance.
As your church grows you need additional rooms for nursery and Sunday School. If your existing space doesn’t have convenient small rooms, you’ll need to move. In fact you’ll often have to do this anyway as you gain followers. Churches go through several moves as they grow, hermit-crab style.
Unless you started with a too-big space, you will probably hermit crab your way through larger and larger gymnasiums until a nearby church fails, at which point you merge with them or buy their building. Buying the building is preferable; mergers saddle you with a bunch of people who aren’t bought into your cult of personality. The most successful churches will go on to build their own giant buildings.
Two hundred regular attendees is a big milestone for planted churches. I first heard it mentioned merely as a size few churches get past, but it’s also a financial threshold. At 200 people, the variation evens out so you can have a longer planning horizon, and probably afford a backup pastor.
Every church planter at least pays lip service to the goal of planting more churches. That requires rapid buildup. I’ve varyingly heard that if you don’t support a new church plant in the first 5, 3, or 1.5 years, you never will.
Past 200 attendees I know less, because there aren’t that many megachurch planters going on these podcasts. However, you do eventually achieve the biggest crab shell possible, or just put down enough roots that you can’t transition again. If you attract any more people after that you start streaming your sermons to other rooms on the same property. Eventually (2,000 people?), you begin streaming to off-site locations, which is known as being a multi-site church (more recently, you’ll also start streaming online).
Multisite churches are something of a micro-denomination, where an existing church will create a new physical location that is still considered part of the original church, with the same lead pastor. Generally most of its sermons are piped in from the original church (Evangelicals are on the forefront of using new tech in service of God). It will have at least one site-lead pastor. Initially, I assumed this pastor did the work of local ministering- couples counseling, running food banks, etc. But these things aren’t emphasized much at evangelical churches, so I’m not quite sure what fills their days.
A minority of pastors are too entrepreneurial and will leave their settled church to plant a new one, but it seems far more common for the founders to stay on indefinitely.
The Theology
You’ll notice I didn’t mention theology beyond recruitment, or what people do after shaking Jesus’s hand. That’s because independent pastors and even many denominations rarely discuss this. The dominant attitude (going back to at least the 1850s) is that they don’t want to let petty disagreements about the nature of God and the Church disrupt the vital business of throwing parties where people can meet Jesus.
The passphrase for this is “I teach the Bible.” That sounds neutral but since everyone has a frame and everyone injects that frame into their teaching, what it actually means is “My interpretation of the Bible is so obvious it hasn’t occurred to me people could draw other conclusions” This annoys everyone (exact episode lost) who both teaches from the Bible and recognizes that neutrality is not a human possibility. But it successfully functions as a passphrase for people who have agreed they’re on the same team.
The Failures
This section is weaker because failed planters rarely go on podcasts. That said…
The goal of church planters is to bring people to Jesus. As a whole, evangelicalism is not growing faster than the population, so seems like the system is failing by their lights.
Individual planters have a failure rate of somewhere between 30% and 90%, depending on their support levels and how you define “attempt”- right in the range of tech start-ups.
For systemic data on why churches fail I rely heavily on this survey by Dan Steel of struggling (not necessarily failed) church plants. The top issues he found:
A guest on New Churches Podcast gives the following reasons, in unquantified order of importance:
I didn’t bother looking up numbers for why start-ups fail but from party chatter the list is pretty similar.
The Alternatives
Starting a church is a lot of work; why not just take over an existing one? The official reason is that God called them to, and that new churches are the best way to introduce more people to Jesus, which is the most important act of worship. But I can’t help but notice that for a certain personality type, planting your own church seems way more fun than stepping into an existing one, for the same reason he’d have more fun founding a start-up than being a middle manager at IBM.
When you found a church (or a company), you’re baked into it. Everyone who attends (works for) your church is there because they like you. That’s a great feeling (especially if you’re a narcissist). It also saves you a whole lot of problems with parishioners who remember how their last pastor organized Sunday School and will fight any change tooth and nail. If you join an existing church and it closes, you broke something that worked. If your church plant closes, well, planting is risky, and at least you were willing to try (a pastor’s second planting attempt is much scarier, because now if you fail it’s a pattern).
Starting a new church is more work, of course, but lots of people would rather put the work in if they can be their own boss.
The Attendees
Thus far, I’ve found church planting admirably consistent in its efforts to reach its stated goal (recruit people who are not in contact with Jesus and get them to shake his hand, thus saving them from eternal damnation). We’ve already looked at how the system as a whole is not growing, but there’s a subtler issue in who they aim at.
The closer someone is to death, the closer they are to eternal damnation. So you’d think that if saving souls was your goal, you’d focus on saving the elderly. As a bonus, the old-but-not-decrepit have more money and more hours to volunteer. However, planters seem almost sneering at the elderly, calling them “white hairs” and “bald heads” who are more trouble than they’re worth. In practice, attendees tend to be within 10 years of the age of the pastor, so if a 25-year-old found your plant, it won’t attract 65-year-olds for 30 years. The sense I get is that churches and funders go after young families because they are sexy, the same way that the start-up ecosystem didn’t discover parents as a market until 10 years ago.
Speaking of sexy: the sexiest recruits are those new to Jesus, or at least prodigal sons. If you listen to church planters talk, these people make up the majority of attendees. But given the population numbers, we know that attendance is not growing faster than the population and have a higher-than-average fertility rate, they are net losing people. They could be shedding lots of people and then recruiting some back, but based on some survey data, it seems like they’re mostly not.*
I ultimately guess that 10-40% of attendees could in some sense be considered new recruits. My sources:
It’s good for pastors that most of their flock is already on board with Jesus, because it means they’re also on board with tithing. Conventional wisdom is that it takes 4 years for the previously unchurched to contribute financially. Given that only the most generous funders supply 4 years of expenses, and some only a few months, it is absolutely imperative for pastors to attract people with an existing tithing habit.
If a new member was already Christian, your hope is that they’re new to the city as well. “Stolen sheep,” aka people who moved to your church because they were dissatisfied with their last one, are considered a mixed blessing. They will tithe and probably volunteer, but it’s unlikely they will be long term satisfied with your church. If they were the type of person to be satisfied, they’d have been so at their last church. If you let them, they’ll suck up a bunch of your time and emotional energy on their way out, which is why one pastor suggests ignoring them.
The Supporters
Wives
I’ve yet to hear about a church planter who wasn’t married when he founded his church. They always describe their wives as also experiencing a call from God to be a pastor’s wife, which is extremely convenient.
By default, wives end up with whatever church work their husband doesn’t want or is bad at. This is especially likely to be work that requires high conscientiousness, involves children, or involves other women. They also need to do all the work at home that their partner isn’t doing because pastoring is sucking up all their time, or perhaps provide income because the church can’t fully support the family. And they’re doing most of the parenting.
Pastors’ wives are expected to make friends with the women of the church but also keep their problems private, because it would undermine their husband’s job if people knew he was unreliable about taking out the trash.
Overall church wife-ing seems like at least as much work as pastoring, with fewer rewards.
Support Teams
Many pastors mention launching with other families from their sending church. They frequently discuss how important support teams are, but almost never what their supporters did that was so valuable. Maybe music? Surely set up and tear down. And it’s useful to have people in the pews right from the beginning so nonbelievers don’t walk into an empty church. But overall this feels like a blank spot in my knowledge because the support team never goes on podcasts and for all that pastors sing their praises, they rarely give specifics.
I posit that pastors are performing the equivalent of thanking the little people at their Oscar speech because they know they’re supposed to, but don’t believe it in their heart of hearts that other people are very important. In contrast, you do tend to incidentally hear about the work their wives do.
Mission Teams
You know how churches sometimes send teenagers to Mexico for a week to build houses? Well sometimes they instead send those teens to a recently planted domestic church, to ring doorbells, volunteer at vacation bible school, or do manual labor. These have only come up in one episode, which was spent complaining about how they were worse than useless (under the guise of acknowledging that the pastors didn’t know how to use them productively). The most useful function mentioned was mowing the pastor’s own lawn, to free up his time.
Conclusion
Biology has a concept called convergent evolution– that if you put two distantly related animals in the same ecological niche, they will evolve to be more similar to each other than their respective recent ancestors. Think dolphins evolving the same fins and tail as sharks, despite having bones and needing to breathe air. Silicon valley and church planting sure seem to me like they’ve gone through convergent evolution, but what is the ecological niche?
And when you combine those, what you get are hits-based economies and a lot of negative externalities.
Sources
Podcasts
Inside a CATHOLIC Megachurch (Protestant Perspective)
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church (all episodes)
Everything I Did Wrong as a Church Planter: A Million Part Series (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22)
The Lutheran Church Planter (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22)
New Churches Podcast (26/236 episodes)
Canadian Church Planting (10/41 episodes)
Terminal: The Dying Church Planter (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22)
CMN Church Planting Podcast (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22
Revitalize and Replace (4/236 episodes)
Ministry Wives (1/201 episodes)
Pastors Wives Tell All (1/332 episodes)
Articles
The Priority & Practice of Evangelism: Canadian Church Leader Perspectives in 2021
Religious Change in America
Do We Really Need Another Church Plant?
Evangelism and “Nones and Dones” in Canada
Books
The Evangelicals, by Frances Fitzgerald.
Thanks
Thanks to Patrick LaVictoire and the Progress Studies Blog Building Initiative for feedback on this post. Thanks to my Patreon supporters and the CoFoundation Fellowship for their financial support of my work.