Church Planting in Our Cultural Moment: Challenge and Response
Preparing church planters has long been part of Covenant Seminary’s pastoral training mission, but the need for new churches—and well-trained planters to lead them—remains great. To help meet this need, the Seminary a few years ago instituted the Church Planting Track, a specialized addition to our MDiv and MABTS degree programs, along with a new Church Planting Scholarship for qualified students. Thanks to a recent grant from the Association of Theological Schools, Covenant will expand its efforts to recruit and train church planters, while working in close partnership with Mission to North America (MNA), our denominational church planting agency, and other ministries to help build Christ’s church within the PCA and beyond. In the first of a series of periodic posts on church planting, Dr. Murray Lee, MNA Executive Coordinator, and the MNA Executive Team offer a reflection adapted from the MNA vision statement about the challenges of our cultural moment and how MNA and its partners are working to address them.
The Challenge: Our Changing Cultural Circumstances
For over 50 years the Lord has been pleased to use Mission to North America to cultivate the advancement of his kingdom through the Presbyterian Church in America. The PCA maintains our commitment to being faithful to the Scriptures, true to the Reformed Faith, and obedient to the Great Commission in the current age. Over the last few decades, it has become very clear that the cultural landscape has shifted in North America. As Jim Davis and Michael Graham wrote in their book The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? (Zondervan, 2023), “We are currently in the middle of the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country as tens of millions of formerly regular Christian worshippers nationwide have decided they no longer desire to attend church at all.”
For the first time in our history, the United States is no longer a majority Christian nation. For as long as we have been keeping track, church membership has been consistently above 70 percent of all Americans. At the turn of the current century, church membership began to plummet and is now below of 50 percent and continuing to decline. Approximately two dozen churches shut their doors every day in America. The Atlantic has called this “America’s Epidemic of Empty Churches.” That number continues to grow as nearly two-thirds of American churches are on the cusp of financial insolvency (see The Atlantic for Nov. 25, 2018).
This wave of secularization fosters a culture of contempt for one another in the face of longing for community. People whose deepest need is to know the beauty of the gospel and experience Spirit-empowered reconciliation with God and one another see the church as caught up in partisan polarization. At the same time, this contempt is driving people from the pews as the pursuit of disagreement supplants love and relationship. For both groups, the church is becoming irrelevant. Consequently, there is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. Additionally, since 1995, as the U.S. population has grown exponentially, church membership has taken an equal and opposite trend: as our nation grows, our churches are emptying out.
The impact of this on communities nationwide is immense. Without these congregations, our neighborhoods, towns, and cities risk greater isolation, hopelessness, and fear rather than experiencing connection, gospel hope, and freedom. Our nation urgently needs the gospel, and the church plays a crucial role in weaving the gospel into every aspect of our lives.
In the midst of all this, the PCA has planted around 50 new churches each year for the past generation. That number declined from 50 to 42 over the last 12 years but is slowly recovering. During this same period, we have seen a loss of approximately 37 churches a year. This leaves us with a net gain of 5 additions each year. To make a significant contribution to the number of churches needed to keep up with population growth, the PCA must more than double in size in the next ten years. This seems like a daunting task.
The Response: A Commitment to Church Planting in the PCA
Yet, while some respond to these realities with alarm, at MNA we believe that we are in the middle of a great opportunity for gospel impact in North America. Coincident with the religious shift we are experiencing is a demographic shift resulting in North American communities becoming much more culturally and ethnically diverse. Our church has the opportunity to proclaim the gospel to the nations and impact the world without leaving these shores. We believe that these shifts declare that the Lord is on the move, and we are committed to laboring for the cause of his kingdom so that the kingdom of the world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and image bearers from every tribe, language, people, and nation will worship the Lamb of God (Rev. 7:9; 11:15).
But how do we go about doing this? What is the best way to reach our de-churched neighbors and those who identify as “nones” with regard to religious affiliation, when previous ways of evangelizing no longer hold sway?
Surprisingly, our experience shows that the best way to evangelize is by planting churches. Yes, more people come to faith in our country and within the PCA through the starting of new churches than any other single method or strategy. Why? Because the beginning of a new church provides a safe way for seekers and those with a difficult or painful church history to start engaging again, to put a toe in the water, so to speak, and to listen afresh to the simple truth of faith in Christ.
So, to reach our neighbors and affect gospel change in our cities, neighborhoods, culture, and nation, we need to plant more churches and help them last and thrive. And to do this, we need a multi-pronged approach. In addition to adding more churches, we must provide structures and resources to ensure that fewer churches close down. If our denomination can continue planting 50 churches each year and at the same time reduce the number of church closures by half, we can realize a net gain of 30 churches each year! Such a result requires not only the recruiting and training of more church planters, but also the combined efforts of many within our denomination—from agencies and committees to local churches and individuals—to support the work with prayers, finances, networking, partnerships, and boots-on-the-ground, hands-on-the-plow hard work. This kind of cooperation is vital to success.
The Next Steps: Moving Forward in Faith
As the PCA’s denominational agency tasked with church planting and resourcing, MNA provides expertise with excellence to all PCA churches, presbyteries, and networks in North America by offering a suite of practical ministry resources—from training, equipping, and assisting in missional purpose, to serving communities to advance God’s kingdom. Our focus on church vitality and church planting guides and supports denominational efforts in all facets of planting new churches and strengthening existing ones. MNA also deploys a variety of other ministries to assist with particular needs of the church, its members, and their respective areas of service within the broader kingdom.
Building on this solid base and looking ahead as we seek to address the challenges around us in the present moment, MNA now seeks to greatly multiply its impact through several new initiatives and expanded capacities. Our hope, should God be pleased to bless our efforts, is to see over 1,000 new PCA congregations and hundreds of thousands of new believers in Christ from all over the world. Ideally, this would mean growing the PCA by 200,000 families, impacting 3,000 communities, and seeing over 500,000 professions of faith in Christ. We aim to do this through a combination of planting new churches, reducing church closures, enfolding some existing congregations into the PCA, and expanding the diversity of our denomination. This is a bold vision to be sure, and MNA cannot accomplish it alone. We will:
Partner with our sister denominational agencies and committees and other like-minded organizations to recruit, train, develop, and deploy a significant number of church planting candidates.
Develop strategic partnerships with seminaries, churches, presbyteries, and minority leaders within the denomination and provide scholarships for minority leaders who pursue seminary training.
Provide regular teaching and on-site training within the seminary classroom context to help future pastors discern their call to church planting, and develop and distribute resources on church planting.
Significantly expand our Church Planting Assessment process and provide ongoing coaching and timely consulting and strategic support for pastors and congregations to help them thrive.
Work with presbyteries and church planting networks to provide a multi-track church planting training program on the competencies and skills needed to plant a church.
Provide churches an apprentice and residency program model and create and distribute continued education and resources for church planters.
Expand the presence of MNA’s ministries within every presbytery to ensure that churches have access to ministry resources that will support and build each congregation, with a special focus on some new efforts such as Mandarin Speaking Chinese Ministries, Cantonese Speaking Chinese Ministries, South Asian Ministries, Pan Asian Ministries, Rural Church Development, and African Ministries.
By God’s grace and with the prayers and support of our denomination and our many ministry partners, we aim to move forward boldly, with sure and steady faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the head of his church and the Shepherd of our souls. We invite you to join us on this exciting adventure to multiply churches that will not only survive but thrive, bringing gospel grace to a desperate world and greater glory to the name of Jesus.
Covenant Seminary is already working with MNA and others on many aspects of this bold church planting vision as we aim to train and send the next generation of leaders who will plant and grow more biblically sound, confessionally Reformed churches in the US and across North America. You can help to make this vison a reality by ensuring that our Church Planting Track and Church Planting Scholarship remain strong and vital. How can you do this?
Pray for us and our partners and support us financially.
Refer potential church planting students to us.
Connect us with influencers and others who can have an impact on our efforts.
We value your partnership in our ministry!
