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________See also Intro, Part 2 & Part 3_________

North America is the home of “big-launch” church plants, celebrity pastors, multi-site campuses, video venues, and a bigger-is-better approach to ministry in general. However, pioneered by church planters and missiologists like Alan Hirsch and Neil Cole, the overlapping categories of small groups, cell groups, and house churches have also gained a degree of acceptability and allure.

The purpose of this series is to explore the mechanics of planting a church via a small group strategy–but with the caveat that there is no hypothetical growth cap or “preferred size” for the growing church. For our purposes, a “small group” will be understood as a missional community of eight to twelve people who meet weekly to pray, study the Bible, grow in Christian fellowship, and work on ministry tasks.

A third category of church plants exist: those that “launch small,” adopting a small group dynamic to get off the ground, while maintaining the expectation of sustained growth-growth that, if it culminated in sprawling mega church services, would provoke no feelings of regret.

Frequently, when large services and small groups are pursued within the church planting context, they represent a demarcation between contrasting ministry philosophies and cultural streams. Planters who build large churches are comfortable working within a church bureaucracy and expect to wield considerable authority. Meanwhile, practitioners who prefer a decentralized, postmodern ethos readily embrace a ministry approach that aims small and stays small (sometimes even microscopic).[1] However, a third category of church plants exist: those that “launch small,” adopting a small group dynamic to get off the ground, while maintaining the expectation of sustained growth-growth that, if it culminated in sprawling mega church services, would provoke no feelings of regret.

Frequently, the governing assumption in church planting is that if a church planter intends to build a large church, he should start large, and there is statistical warrant for this, since only 20 percent of churches that begin with 1-25 adults grow rapidly, exceeding statistical norms.[2] The difficulties faced by churches stay small are well documented. [3]

However, many healthy churches trace their origins back to a small group of people who were inspired by a unifying vision. Today, church plants continue to grow and become established, even when they begin with the odds dramatically stacked against them: “About ten to twenty people a week were showing up for our Sunday service, which had outgrown the living room of my rental home and was now being held in one of those epically awful youth room, complete with the golden shag carpet on the floor and the Christian rock posters on the wall…”[4] The question is, how can a church plant be positioned in such a way that “starting small” and “growing big” are both feasible? We will attempt to briefly identify seven “best practices” that can contribute to building a healthy church plant via small groups.

________See also Intro, Part 2 & Part 3_________

[1] Gibbs and Bolger, Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005). Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger document a “church” in England that is composed of 12 members and does not intend to grow further.

[2] Stephen Gray, Planting Fast-Growing Churches (LifeWay.com, 2007). 3 May 2008, available from [2] Stephen Gray, Planting Fast-Growing Churches (LifeWay.com, 2007). 3 May 2008, available from LifeWay.

[3] Ed Stetzer, Small Church Research (LifeWay.com.com, 2008). 3 May 2008, available from [3] Ed Stetzer, Small Church Research (LifeWay.com.com, 2008). 3 May 2008, available from Ed Stetzer’s Blog.

[4] Mark Driscoll, Confessions of a Reformission Rev. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 38.

Over the next several days I’ll be posting a series on Church Planting with Small Groups. These posts are drawn from a research paper I wrote last semester, and as such, they represent a shotgun approach to the diverse (and sometimes ambiguous) world of “best practices” in church planting.

However, I made a concerted attempt to combine missional, incarnational thinking with advice that pertains to all or most “small group” church plants (which I define). You’ll also notice that I weighted statistical research from guys like Ed Stetzer and Stephen Gray fairly highly–but I tried to cull the findings for insights that had special relevance for plants that begin with small groups.

As a disclaimer, I should also admit that I wrote the original paper near the end of the semester, when I was running on espresso fumes and would have hired someone to write the paper for me…if I’d been able to find a qualified ghost writer…and if that person had been willing to work for about $2. Just kidding, but you get the gist. I’m very invested in this topic, since it likely represents the nuts & bolts of what I’ll be doing in a few months–but I also know that my findings represent a humble and overly caffeinated perspective, and I hope to learn a lot more.

With the intro out of the way, look out tomorrow for Part 1 in Church Planting that Starts with Small Groups.