The Egg

Let’s imagine Christian Reformed Home Missions decided it wanted to try to plant one “successful” church plant with large funding rather than spreading its resources among 20 to 30 startups. How much would it cost for a new church start-up done “right” by a denomination?

• Employment cost (salary, housing, health ins., pension, expenses, etc.) for your top drawer, ordained point leader: 90-130k a year.
• Worship leader cost: 80k
• Youth leader cost 80k
• 2 part time admin staff cost: 100k
• Rent for worship space, office space, ministry space: 120k
• Operating costs, publicity, etc. 100k

Total: 500k to 600k for year one. Assume this level of funding for 3 years.

These numbers might look HUGE to CRC people, but church planters will probably look at them and say “I wish I had that kind of support” while others would say “this is too small for our community”.

Looking for the Golden-Egg-Laying Goose

OK, now that you have your budget, the denomination’s next step is to find that point leader. Who should this person be? Let the politics begin.

• Male or female? Oh, don’t even go there…
• Ethnicity? We’re already creeping into the “target group” conversation, Did he/she grow up in western Michigan? African-American? Hispanic? Korean? Chinese? Anglo?
• Young or experienced? Young is attractive but track record is necessary.
• Methodological bias: Seeker? city center-hipster? Mark Driscoll new-Reformed-macho-grunge? CRC royalty bloodlines? Community developer? Ambiguously white-middle-class suburban?

How might we pick this person? CRHM search team? What might Synod weigh in? How might denominational special interests lean in?

Location Location Location

Options 1: if you believe the Snapper thesis at all a smart bet would be Western Michigan or another colony area. Be ready for the NIMBY revolt. CRCs that are struggling would fear the giant sucking sound of the new super-church siphoning off their youngest, brightest and most energetic. members. Do you want the cooperation of a classis? Of a mother-church?

Option 2: Anyplace else. Now we’re back to the “who” question and the methodology question.

• The seeker devotees will suggest a booming suburb, as if a suburb of San Fran or LA or NYC or Chicago or Seattle or Las Vegas or Atlanta or (pick any major city in Texas or Florida, or keep picking) would be the same.
• The city center folks will be looking for an urban area, or a neighborhood within one.
• Your ethnic groups will be looking for major immigrant concentrations.

OK GO!

After probably the year of run up, all the drama and denominational politics, what are the odds that you have now produced your “sure thing”? You’re giving one tiny little group of people a very expensive course in how to try to do something.

In all likelihood what you will get isn’t much different from what you would get if you put in a fraction of the money, leveraged more local and regional funding and support, etc.

The lower cost-multiple attempt approach would yield far more baptisms, disciples, and you invest many more potential leaders with invaluable experience in all sort of important things (preaching to pagans, administration, evangelism, leadership development).

Crowd Sourcing-Right place-Right time vs. System 

If your goal is a mega church, there are two ways these churches emerge: either out of massively crowd sourced church planting (hundreds of church planters from all sorts of backgrounds out of which a few pastors and a few churches get to be churches of unusual size.)  or some churches that have systems of growth, usually leveraging the success of one large church for the development of a CLUSTER of others around them.

Since the CRC has no track record with predictably establishing a string of large congregations (besides immigration-migration) mostly growing via evangelism (or taking members from other declining churches) trying to start as many churches as possible seems to be the best option.

Why Plant Churches? 

Tim Keller’s PDF on this is still valid.

What does the CRC gain with its investment in church planting?

• With every new graduating class you give a handful of young leaders some of the best, hardest skill development in doing basic evangelism, discipleship, preaching, and church leadership that they can have.
• You raise up a group of non-seminary trained leaders in the denomination.
• You energize established churches for mission
• You have a shot at helping the CRC gain some ground up ethnic diversity and ethnic leaders
• You feed the creative-missional-theological-contextual-ecclesiastical development that will be vital if the CRC will be able to engage our context for the next generations.
• You do this probably for less financial investment than we pay for a host of regular services (health care, pension, etc.)

Clustering

If you see the value of church planting for the future development of the CRC and its leadership, you’ll have to ask how to do this.

Church planting is very difficult, and it is especially hard on church planters. Pastoring is a very isolated occupation that often breeds loneliness. Church planters are of course not immune to this.

Church planters need a community around them, to try out ideas, to vent, to struggle, etc. We all need that.

We could spend a ton of money on a few church plants, and probably keep them staffed. It would of course by no means insure success, or we could offer community to church planters, to hopefully give them time to grow, learn, try, even fail, but in the process we are investing in people, investing in relationships, investing in communities, and building the church slowly, painful, from the ground up.

Along the way we’ll grow lots of leaders through pain and suffering often. We’ll help the CRC become more diverse. We’ll help the CRC be better able to engage lots of different communities. We’ll help these leaders develop the theology, the liturgy and the ecclesiology to work in the thousands of different communities that make up our mission field.

Clustering won’t save the CRC by the kinds of huge successes pastors think they want. What it might do is save some leaders from the kind of isolation and discouragement that short cuts leaders from staying in leadership and sticking with the church.