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Measuring the beginnings of a church planting movement

While skimming blogs and news reports, I have often read people who are grappling with how to know when a church planting movement is happening. Some are upset and frustrated because they want or feel they are required to have a movement in their neck of the world but it’s just not happening.

In reality, I think it is possible CPMs are happening. Part of the problem is that CPMs, and movements of any kind, are difficult to detect in the “day of small beginnings.” Just because it is difficult to detect them doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. Movements should be small when they start. Massive revivals are great for newsletters but bad for reproduction: the individual participants cannot reproduce them without a certain level of training, so they cannot multiply. A movement must proceed slow and small enough at each stage of reproduction so a sufficient number of participants can be rapidly trained to reproduce another “generation” of it.

And it’s not just the miniscule size that makes them difficult to see: we are also often looking at the wrong indicators. When we think of a church planting movement, we naturally look for churches that have been planted. Most CPM practitioners, however, aren’t looking for what we typically refer to as a church - a building or a large congregation of believers. Instead, they are thinking of small fellowships: house churches, typically, or regular meetings in a restaurant or some other place. In fact, Ethne talks less about CPM and more about Holistic Gospel Movements - the movement of the Gospel through a society that transforms lives. The point is to measure the rapid reproduction and multiplication of believers who regularly fellowship with each other for corporate worship and interpersonal support.

In this article, I am going to propose a few simple indicators you can monitor to identify a nascent CPM. I base these entirely on Garrison’s work, but I’m adding in some numbers to give you an idea of the scope you are hunting for. These are based on the idea that for church planting to make headway against the population, you only need to exceed the birth rate (which in most cases is not more than say 4% per annum–or 4 or 5 people per 100).

1. Are believers praying for their unbelieving friends? Are they praying in an organized way on a regular basis? Do they have specific people that they are praying for, and specific requests? Praying for others is a great way to get one’s eyes off one’s self. One way to measure this is to divide up any fellowship meeting into at least 4 parts: worship, pray for others, discipleship, fellowship. If you meet for 2 hours, then perhaps 15 to 30 minutes could be spent praying for the needs of seekers known to the fellowship’s members. This prayer is the first “step”–the movement of a movement.

2. Is the Gospel being shared regularly with nonbelievers? How much “mass gospel sowing” is your group doing? How much is being done by other missions around you? How much personal gospel sowing is being done by believers in your network? You can come up with a pretty rough back-of-the-napkin calculation of the number of offers being made. Remember, in reality, you need a *lot* of offers. You need to create an environment where the Gospel and the offering of the Gospel is like a fragrant aroma, so when a person is open to the Good News it will be readily available to them. No single offer is going to do it or single form of evangelism is going to do it–don’t let anyone tell you different. If they try, they’re just pushing their ministry. So figure out a rough estimate of the number of offers being made, and then compare it to the population. See if you can figure out a per-person, per-year average (e.g. total offers divided by total population). Is it less than 1?

3. Are you intentionally starting new fellowships? Do all the believers have the training and tools to start and sustain small fellowships? Are at least 2% of believers doing so? Do you know why fellowships die? Are you encouraging people who are part of a dead fellowship to start anew? If no one is starting a fellowship group, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t spread–and these fellowships don’t just spontaneously start and keep on going, typically.

4. Do people rely on the Bible as their authority? Are believers being trained to read the Bible for themselves, to interpret it for themselves, to discuss and with civility argue things out so they know what they believe? Can they make decisions about church structure, ministry outreaches, etc. if there are no foreigners around, based on what they read in the Bible? They may not know the verses off the top of their head–honestly, there’s a lot of verses *I* don’t know off the top of my head. On the other hand, if they know how to search out what the Bible has to say about a subject, they won’t need to search out what a foreigner has to say about it.

5. Are locals leading? Are fellowships being hosted and led by locals? Are they being mentored by locals? How big of a hole would there be if the foreigners pulled out? I have heard people say “these people just aren’t ready”: but if you get expelled, then they have to be ready. Our job is not to support local believers, holding their hands until we think they are ready. Our job is to constantly encourage people into making decisions they and we feel they are not ready to make, so that they learn *how* to make them. Besides, look at the Chinese church: after all the expatriates were kicked out, so many were sure the Chinese church would die — and that’s hardly the case. I would look for a high percentage of leaders to be locals, and keep shoving it toward 100%. If it’s anything less than 90% then there’s a problem to be looked at.

6. Is the local leadership mostly lay leadership? I would look for a high percentage of fellowship leaders to be lay leaders, and keep increasing that percentage. There is a place for professional training, but the scale of world evangelization means that a lot of unprofessional, unpaid, local, lay leadership is going to be required. We need hundreds of millions of fellowships, and there’s not enough seminaries in the world to train everyone, or enough time. So just scratch the idea that a fellowship host has to have a seminary degree. How do you help people maintain purity and correct theology? Accept that there’s going to be blunders and mistakes, that we aren’t saved by our proper theology, and that people need to be able to read the Bible for themselves and lovingly argue it out with each other. There are plenty of saints throughout history who have made mistakes, but Christianity is still here, alive and strong.

7. Are most fellowships not in official church buildings? For the Gospel to flow rapidly you have to remove every single barrier you can possibly remove. It has to be fluid, easy, discrete. It has to be a setting where seekers feel free to enter, to ask questions, to discuss, to argue. It has to be a trusted place of friendship. It has to not cost a lot to set up. If every church has to have a building to be considered a church, there’s not enough time and money for it to happen anytime soon. Push for over 90% of all fellowships to be in a non-official setting.

8. Are churches planting churches? Are at least 2% of existing fellowships training their members to plant new fellowships? If you’re waiting for some kind of organized church planter or denominationally led initiative, then you’re going to be waiting a long time for the completion of the Great Commission. Believers need to be trained, encouraged, and challenged to start new fellowships quickly. Remember, a fellowship is just a meeting of 2 or 3 or 4 believers in a non-traditional, easy setting where the Gospel can flow from life to life over relational lines.

9. Rapid reproduction. How long does it take to plant a new fellowship that plants another fellowship? That’s the “speed factor”: if it takes years, then it will be multiples of years. Consider the following standard “doubling” formula of the “each one plants one” idea:

2 - 4 - 8 - 16 - 32 - 64 - 128 - 256 - 512 - 1k -
2k - 4k - 8k - 16k - 32k - 65k - 131k - 262k - 524k - 1m
2m - 4m - 8m…

Now, if each fellowship consists of, say, 4 people, then 1m (1 million) fellowships equals just 4 million people. That’s great but a pittance in the midst of China or India. If each fellowship “generation” takes a year to establish, then it would take 9 years to get to 9,000 believers, and about 18 years to get to 4 million. How many to get to 1 billion? And in reality we know of course most churches do not plant a church every year.

This is why we need easily planted fellowships led by easily trained leaders that can be reproduced fast - no more than one year per new church plant. Even better, can each fellowship plant a new fellowship twice a year? four times a year? six times a year?

You can do this if you think of it this way: what is the fellowship supposed to do? Don’t add lots of things that aren’t necessary. In the words of software development, “resist feature creep.” Fellowships should exist for the sake of worship, outreach, discipleship and accountability. Starting a new fellowship simply means inviting new people to another location. If each fellowship is engineered so that, from the beginning, it is not trying to sustain itself but rather training fellowship-starters, it becomes much easier to launch new cells.

Eventually a saturation point will be reached and then you shift into a new phase. But that’s for another article, and that point won’t be reached for many “generations.”

10. Are fellowships healthy? There needs to be a standard for what a “healthy” fellowship is, and there needs to be a way of monitoring to make sure that fellowships are healthy. Because things spread via relationship, you need to check for 98% health of all fellowships. If fellowships are not healthy, they shouldn’t be reproducing, as they’ll just reproduce their problems. One suggestion for a healthy cell is one that regularly: 1) worships, 2) has evangelistic outreach, 3) educates and disciples its members, 4) ministers to its members and 5) provides fellowship for its members.

So, here’s the way to measure a CPM. If you have a network of 4 house groups, and they meet 7 or 8 out of these 10 indicators, and within a year those 4 house groups have started 3 new house groups - you probably have a movement. That’s it. Yes, it’s small. Yes, it’s not influential within the country and possibly not even the city. But in 9 years it could represent over 5,000 believers, and 9 years after that it could represent 4 million.

The CURRENT SIZE of a movement does not matter. In my view, there is no threshold size that says “this is a church planting movement.” The health of the network and how fast it reproduces itself is ALL that matters when you are considering how rapidly a region can be evangelized.

My suggestion: make a grid chart that lists these 10 factors as 10 columns, and the fellowship groups you have right now (or the proto-groups, centered on leaders) as the rows. For each row, in each column, leave the space blank if the factor isn’t present in that group. Put an “X” if it is. Put a single slash (”/” or “\”–half an X) if with just a bit of work it could be done. This is your “dashboard” or “status screen” or “diagnostic” or “check list.” Start working on the slashes, while at the same time picking some likely groups and working on the empty slots.

Fellowship	Pray	Sow	CP	Bible	Local	Lay	Multiply	Rapid	Healthy
Flshp 1
Flshp 2
Flshp 3
Flshp 4

Don’t despise the day of small beginnings. Yes, there’s a lot to do, and yes, you’ll wish that TODAY was the day of harvest. But if you faithfully continue in the effort and the work, it may be that in 9 to 18 years you may see a significant harvest. The harvest itself is in God’s hands. All he asks us to do is to be faithful workers.

One final word: don’t let others make you despise the day of small beginnings. If they are in the midst of a harvest, it could be that they have built on the work of those before them (one plants, one waters, one harvests) or it could be that they are at the end of a long period of their own work. But rest assured, if someone tells you to “just use” this book or “just use” this sermon or “just use” this style or “just do it the way I have done it”–it’s probably not a good idea. My advice to you: go back to point #4 above and see how it lines up.

Other Related Posts

• Introductory Post - Jason Benedict
• Every Part Doing its Work

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Related: The Mission Manual · Justin Long's Annotated Links and Notes