OUR VISION
Imagine Fellowship* plans to reach and grow thousands for Christ in San Antonio, Texas. Imagine Fellowship will also train a new generation of leaders who have the heart and drive to start churches over the entire United States. We will plant a church in every city that has 100,000 or more (there are roughly 262 cities). These churches will also train church planters so that every city has a church that is engaging the next generation for Christ.
Scripture
God can do anythingâyou know, far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! (Ephesians 3:20, The Message)
Ten years ago, you would have had to look far and wide to find a church with such vision. Today churches like Imagine Fellowship with a vision for multiplication are springing up everywhere; so many, in fact, that we were inspired to write this book. We believe that we are on the edge of seeing an exponential multiplication movement in the United States, and that these churches are leading the way.
Church planting is good. A vision for a church multiplication movement is better.
Many of you will not be content with a one-off church plant that serves only to replace a dying church. You share Imagine Fellowshipâs vision for massive church multiplication. Viral Churches is our effort to fan that flame of your passion and give you some new insights as to how it can be accomplished.
National Awakening
Imagine Fellowship is not alone. We know this because of a huge research project commissioned by Leadership Network (where Warren directs the research division), conducted by Ed Stetzer and LifeWay Research (which Ed leads). The data collection and analysis took place in 2007 with relevant information updated in the fall of 2009 for this book. This was arguably the most comprehensive study ever done to review the methods, trends, and out-comes of church planting organizations across the United States. It involved a team of twenty-one people who contacted, surveyed, summarized, and evaluated leaders including
- 200-plus church planting churches
- 100-plus leaders from forty denominations
- 45 church planting networks
- 84 organic church leaders
- 12 nationally known experts
- 53 colleges and seminaries
- 54 doctoral dissertations
- 41 journal articles
- 100-plus church planting books and manuals
The original findings were condensed into four free âState of Church Planting USAâ reports at Leadership Networkâs Web site, www.leadnet.org/churchplantingresources. Report titles are
- Church Planting Overview
- Funding New Churches
- Improving the Health and Survivability of New Churches
- Who Starts New Churches
This book takes findings from the original project and reframes it to inform, guide, and even catalyze todayâs many church planting leaders, especially those heading, forming, or considering a church planting network. Our hope is to inspire and help you develop a church multiplication movementâan exponential birth of new churches that engage lost people and that replicate themselves through even more new churches. A church multiplication movement is a rapid reproduction of churches planting churches, measured by a reproduction rate of 50 percent through the third generation of churches, with new churches having 50 percent new converts. To achieve such momentum, churches would need to plant, on average, a new church every two years with each church reaching at least half of its attendees from the unchurched community. We believe this rapid reproduction of churches needs to happen among hundreds of niche population groupsâfrom SUV-driving young families in fast-growing suburbs to urban hipster environmentalists to unchurched rural country music lovers.
These days it seems that many people are talking about church planting movements, but we want to move beyond theory to actual doing. This book is to be a practical guide for orchestrating a movement. It will address the idea of what to do next in your church planting strategies, in light of research on whatâs actually working best and within a context of kingdom-minded, Scripture-based theology.
Weâre not just going to describe those church planting movements that we believe God has sparked in certain parts of the world. Weâre prescribing them as the much-needed alternative to inward-focused or addition-based church planting. Though this book is research based, we also take an advocacy perspective. Viral Churches will contain enough stories for participants in church planting at every level to find inspiration and specific help. But most of all, it will speak to a new breed of people who want to populate this country (and beyond), saturating it with a viral movement of multiplying churches.
A virus doesnât re-create itself from scratch. Instead, it infects existing cells to spread a disease. Viral marketing leverages existing social networks to spread ideas. In the same way, we believe that the kingdom of God can spread virally by âinfectingâ every tribe, group, club, neighborhood,...
