However, what especially bothered me was huge (an understatement) difference between what we are doing and what I believe we could and should be doing. What should we be doing? I believe we need and could have a church planting movement—a rapid multiplication of churches planting churches. Such a movement would see us planting at least 1,000 churches a year. Historians say the Restoration Movement was planting this many a year at the beginning of the 20th century.

While the churches we are planting today are stronger than those of 30 or 40 years ago, the data I have indicates that 40 years ago we were planting more churches in a year than are listed* for the past three years—about 100 a year in the mid-1960s. I think a big part of the problem is what seems to be our favorite church-planting strategy. We have heard that church planting is the most effective way to evangelize and have asked, “How can we best plant churches?” At first glance that would seem like a very good question. I think there is a much better question, “What church planting strategy will produce the greatest impact?”

The data I have seen would indicate that while the quality of our church plants is important, the quantity is even more important. The working together that Tom Jones advocates is very good but there are other ways of working together that could produce a lot more church plants. Bob Logan would say that our current strategy of a network of churches planting one church at a time compacts (reduces) the vision and consequently the number of church plants.

Also, do we really need to spend anywhere close to Tom Jones’s figure of "$200,000 to start a healthy, dynamic new church? A lot of our churches couldn’t provide even 10 percent of that over a three-year period. They consequently feel that there is no way they could plant a church.

That is the reason that for a long time I have felt our ideal church-planting model with its large cost was a significant hindrance to planting very many churches. Is it possible to effectively plant churches for a lot less? In the early 1990s Charles L. Chaney, the head of U.S. church planting for the Southern Baptists, in Church Planting at the End of the Twentieth Century, wrote about a Baptist church in the Boston area that had 20 daughters and granddaughters by the time it was 25 years old. The mother church never reached 100 in average attendance during that time.

More recently Dave Jacobs in an article in Cutting Edge, the Vineyard church-planting magazine, wrote that all three of the churches he started sent out teams to plant new churches when his church had about 100 adult members.

A couple of years ago Steve Sjogren, who planted four churches and has coached many other church plants wrote, “We have planted lots of churches with very few resources. . . I am coaching a half dozen churches into existence with the average plant receiving around $10,000 in start-up support. Based on our track record, most of these plants will succeed and even thrive to become sizable churches.” Later he writes, “We hear statements frequently in church planting circles these days such as, ‘It takes $100,000 to $150,000 [or $200,000] to start a church.’ Sentiments such as this concern us because we know they are not true, . . . We can point to a couple of dozen examples that we have been directly involved with where between $5,000-$10,000 was invested to plant a successful church.” If they can do it, why can’t we do it?**

I would wholeheartedly agree with Tom Jones when he says, "Every member of the team is important and should be able to play." The problem right now is that most of our team members (churches) are sitting in the stands and don’t see any possibility that they can get in the game. We need to change that.

Bob Logan has another model of networking to plant churches that has proved effective (a denominational district that used it doubled its average attendance in eight years with not all of the churches in the district participating). The idea is for three to six or seven churches to come together to share non-financial resources, ideas, and encouragement while each church has its own daughter(s) (at least one church in such a network had twins).

*The list is probably incomplete but probably not missing very many church plants. Even if we planted two or three times the number listed, what I am saying is still largely true.

**If the average investment in the 91 church plants reported in Christian Standard was $100,000 (half Tom Jones’s figure) that would equal $9.1 million. If those same dollars were invest