30 Years of Church Planting Failure?

I live in America. It’s 2022 and around me medium to small churches are closing their doors at an unprecedented rate. At another unprecedented rate, though not as great as. the first one, new churches are being planted. Additionally the churches being planted are often much smaller than the ones that are closing their doors. A 2021 Lifeway Research Study concluded that 4,500 churches closed their doors in 2019, while only 3,000 opened their doors. Here is another alarming fact from a 2021 Faith Communities Study - the average church attendance has dropped from 137 to 65 over the past two decades. Which means that it isn’t a sudden problem. It isn’t like a pipe burst in your home and caused lots of damage. Rather it’s been slow. It’s like a water pipe has been leaking for two decades and your house has been sinking into the mud inch by inch and you’re finally realizing that your two story house is now only one story.

So…what’s the problem? Which pipe do we fix?

Well, the issue is that it isn’t one pipe that has been leaking that has caused your house to settle. It’s almost all the pipes that have been leaking. Drip by drip they have eroded a foundation that was laid brick by brick over two millennia. Since the casting of The Great Commission our Apostolic Fathers crafted an expression of the Bride of Christ that we have inherited. Each subsequent generation has laid it’s row of bricks. We added indoor plumbing and electricity as technology advanced. We made grave mistakes and sinned against God in our expression of Him to the world around us. Various generations have apologized and torn down aspects of the house in order to rebuild differently. It has been quite the process. Purchased with blood and sweat and risk and through painstaking discernment.

And now…God’s house has been placed in our hands to steward.

Here is some good news, I think: the church has been in worse shape in its history. The members of this house were hunted to near extinction. They were martyred and persecuted and made to fear retribution so much that the church had to go underground for a time. This violence from outside the church was solved when the government of the day sanctioned a form of the church: state approved. Yay. But then there was violence from within. A great need for theological correctness led to accusations of heresy, excommunications and executions. Further violence from within led to various factions, families and people grappling for supreme power (the Papacy). For a time the halls of the western headquarters of the church were full of troublingly immoral actions and lifestyles. And then the church became violent towards the world and attempted to covert those, outside of itself, with the sword. Yes, the church has been in worse positions than 2022.

In certain places in the world they have moved into a post-Christian, post-Church location in society. Being truly post-Christian means being several generations removed from the societal influence to be a part of church. Portions of Europe and Canada are in this place. There are vague recollections of grandparents attending church but no core memories of parents or children attending. We may mourn such a loss of Christian influence in these areas but with more hopeful eyes we may see that the slate has been cleared for a new work of the Holy Spirit.

Regardless, let us turn our eyes back to the church in America with leaky pipes and a sinking foundation. We can conclude that the church has been worse than it is now. We can observe that we are not in a truly post-Church, post-Christian societal location. Which may lead us to ask: “what is our issue?” And while there are many leaky pipes that we could pick on and admittedly some more easy than others to call out there is one that sticks out to me that may difficult for others to observe or be willing to grapple with: church growth.

When I was growing up we had church growth dinners. As a teenager I was living in the glory days of the church growth movement. Mega-churches had gone from just these things on television to cropping up in people’s backyards all over the America. Mars Hill, Saddleback, Willow Creek and many more were producing technologically savvy services with pastors who held near celebrity status and writing books telling all of us in 100 person churches how to grow our own mini-mega-churches. Money was raised and spent on church plants. New technology, video series, curriculum and discipleship processes were purchased. All to create the exact same, totally unique church plant feel in a gymnasium/movie theatre/coffee shope/renovated grocery store near you. Or all of that in your standard renovated traditional church building. From the outside it looks like an old church but on the inside … did I walk into a hipster-coffee-warehouse-church?

“Welcome to Something or Other Community Fellowship.” (It’s almost always community and it’s almost always fellowship. I think Christian’s like them because they’re church words and the non-churched are okay with them because they’re sort of non-threatening, unassuming words. Someone probably spent a lot of money testing these words with a focus group somewhere and they came back as being welcoming and friendly. So the church growth movement stamped those words on most rebranded churches out there.) “We’re the church for people who don’t like church.” (Which is slang, non-church people talk for … bro, we’re cool.)

Now, it’s been 30 years since the church planting movement. How’d we do?

Well, Willow Creek Church is probably the biggest propagator of the materials that we all used back then. Willow made the assumption that the more programs that you created and the busier church life that a person was involved in the deeper they would grow in their faith. Essentially this was the general model that many of us followed - youth group, VBS, drama ministry, worship team, mens ministry, womens ministry, Bible Studies, etc. Willow did an extensive study called The Reveal Study where they shared publicly that their hypothesis was a failure. Inundating your life with programs did NOT lead to increased spiritual growth. Rather, it led to busier lives. It led to burn out.

As I look back at the various church plants that our denomination planted 30 years ago some of them died for one reason or another. They certainly saw growth in their heyday - some of them reaching sizes of a couple hundred people. Almost of none of them were able to figure out how to make the jump from the founding pastor to a succeeding pastor without a major hit to the attendance. Some struggled to figure out how to stop being a church plant and become a church. When your identity is so wrapped up in being a church plant but you’ve been a plant for ten years … are you really still a plant? Still others still exist today. They made the jump to a brick and mortar building, they left the church plant identity behind and became established, they grew, the founding pastor left and a plan of succession was put into place so that today the community is still thriving.

What you have is an incredible mixed bag of results and quite honestly all that I can report is biased observation speculation. I posit that the 90s church planting boom was no more and no less successful than church planting normally is. For instance, if you were to gather the statistical data on the success and failure of church planting in the 90 years prior to the church planting boom and compare it to the statistical data on the success and failure of the 90s church planting boom, I believe that within a reasonable standard deviation, the success and failure rate would be quite similar. Simply put, we feel the success and failure of the 90s boom much more than the 90 years prior because it came all at once. It is the difference between filling a five gallon bucket of water, with a pin hole in the bottom, and walking underneath it - you barely feel the water hitting you on the head. But walk under that same bucket while someone flips it over and releases the entire contents upon you and there can be no doubt that you will feel it. The amount in the bucket never changed and the hole never changed. The only thing that changed was how much water you were exposed to and how fast.

Paramount is the lessons that we learn from this experience. The 90 years prior to the boom are spread across 4-5 generations. Compiling and passing all that experience along is an impressive feat let alone the lessons learned from it. The 90s church planting boom is a gift because it came across 2-3 generations all exposed simultaneously. Compiling and passing along the experience and lessons are possible and necessary for us to do so that we can help set the stage for our children to create a better version than we did without getting stuck in the mistakes that we made. They don’t have to get lost in an endless number of programs. They don’t have to get burned out by church schedules that never end. They don’t have to start a church without a vision to create a healthy succession plan. These are important lessons that we can hand them so that they can create solutions that will fit the expression of church they creation to honor God. We don’t have to create the solutions, we don’t have to fix it … we need to show them that they are capable of doing that themselves by depending on the Holy Spirit and partnering with God. We just need to teach them what God has been showing us … and then get out of the way because God is at work.