how many churches will you build?

Outreach Magazine released 2007's Top 25 Multiplying Churches. The article highlights some of these churches and their strategies and philosophies for planting daughter churches. It's pretty inspiring. Dave Ferguson, lead pastor of Community Christian Church (#7 on the list) is quoted as, "For us to accomplish Christ's directive, we have come to value the edge over the center, the new over the established, and the lost more than the found."

It's been said that new church plants have a way of attracting the unchurched in a community like your established ministry cannot. They're less intimidating because visitors don't feel like the only new people that everyone's looking at.

If you're starting/working on a building project of your own right now, planting a church may be the last thing you want to think about. But if you're starting/working on a building project right now you know that God is moving your ministry into bigger and better things. Are there volunteers in your church who, with a little training, could plant a church across town (or in the next town) and reach a whole segment of the unchurched that are not attracted to your ministry?

If so, does that mean you should scale down your facility because you'll be sending people off? Not at all. Most of the churches on Outreach's list are still growing themselves. It does mean you should probably become comfortable with the building process, and use it to build the Church (see post below). It may also mean a "renewing of the mind" so that a building project is not something you think about once a decade, but a constant part of the process of expanding God's kingdom on earth.