In the sixty-year history of New Life we’ve planted one church intentionally and at least three unintentionally. I’ve heard the unintentional church plant called a “splant”—a conflation of “split” and “plant.” If you’ve been a Christian for a while, you’ve probably lived through one. Maybe an associate pastor at your church started a church a few miles down the road without the elders’ blessing. Maybe a senior pastor was fired and then started a church nearby, or left and then returned to start a church. Sometimes church leadership retroactively calls these splits plants, and often not with any poor intent: they’re trying to be gracious.
I wonder if that one plant for every three splants is reflective of the average church. My hunch is that splants outpace plants. That is heartbreaking.
Obviously, there is often culpability on those who splant, but churches bear responsibility as well. Far too few churches are committed to God’s intention for them to multiply.
First, let’s confess: it’s hard to multiply. Planting churches is taxing on the mother church. It taxes time, energy, finances, and (most significantly) people. It’s painful. But it’s biblical.
Churches, like people, are intended to be streams not ponds, highways, not cul-de-sacs. The book of Acts shows us a healthy church multiplying itself across the Roman Empire and beyond. Paul is a church planter. Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus are coaching documents for these elder-pastors. If you pick up any of Paul’s other epistles, Paul is training the city-churches at Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, etc. Many forget that these letters weren’t letters to a single church. They were written to one city church, a network of churches in the city. These churches were so connected that Paul could write one letter that would be read by all of them. These were multiplying churches.
It is estimated that only 2% of churches in the United States are multiplying and less than .1% are involved in a multiplying movement. Isn’t that disheartening?
