Church Planting

I read a new study put out by Ed Setzer today and I have to say if it's accurate it rocked my church planting world! His group did a study of church planting over the last ten years and they really made some sense of what most church planters are looking at. First off, according to the numbers the days of being able to send out some mailers and see large amounts of people show up are over. I can echo that. We have seen slightly less than a 1% return on them. For example if we mail out 20,000 mailers we'd see fewer than 20 people show up......for most churches the return rate is 1/3% meaning they'll see about 4-5 people per 20,000 mailers. What they were getting at is that unless God does something supernatural you can plan on growing slower than churches that were planted 15 years ago. I am feeling really good about were we are BTW!

Here are some other factoids I picked up from the study:

• The average church plant sees 10 conversions/baptisms it's first year.
• Most church plants are running under 100 people after 4 years
• Most church plants are just getting to the point where they are financially self sufficient at the 4 year mark.
• The success rate for new church plants is much higher than it was 15 years ago.

I won't tell you exactly where we are on all this yet other than to say we are beating their numbers in every area! If you want details you'll have to be at our vision 2008 service the last Sunday in December.