Some more interesting findings from the NCLS study on the effectiveness of church planting. It’s not a new study (2003) but you can assume the trends have continued.
Green represents the size of a denomination relative to others. Blue represents the relative amount of church planting a denomination is undertaking.
So why are the largest denominations either unable or reluctant to start new churches? Why is a movement that represents little more than 10% of the church going population planting 45% of the new churches in Australia?
What would the Anglican figures look like if you took out the Sydney diocese? What about if we added in non-Anglican churches started in other places by leaders who developed and trained by Sydney?
John Wesley, that great Anglican clergyman, proclaimed, “The world is my parish!†There’s something about dynamic movements that propels them into the world to proclaim the gospel and plant churches.
Australian National Church Life Survey (NCLS)
4 Comments
I’d also want to add the question:
“how many of the new church plants have been started due to congregational splits, how many are strategic/supported plants?” often I’ve found that many church plant’s that I’ve met have been out of a leaving of a congregation/denomination rather than a community planting a church out of an established community.
where I am now we’d have a number of what might be called church plants, but many have come from some kind of theological debate that just “couldn’t be lived with” and so a split (which some would name as a “plant”) has occurred. In many of these cases the plant would attach itself to a pentecostal denomination.
not detracting from the questions you’re raising, but think there are a few other factors that might add to such a high percentage from the pentecostal church.
i think there might actually be a few more reasons for low numbers from the established churches, but i dont have time to go into them atm.
hey steve…. I noticed you took off the interview with the movement planter in the Mid East. That was a fascinating interview…..! will it come back up on the blog??
Shaw. Yes. I made a scheduling error and it posted before I had finished editing. Will get to it soon.
Darren. I don’t have the figures on how many church plants are church splits. I think the story is mixed. I know of some plants that were splits and the people took their issues with them and went nowhere fast. Yet there are many plants and new movements that have been born out of painful disputes that have made significant contributions.
Carl George used to say, some church splits are actually churches that were “pregnant” and didn’t take the initiative to plant. He argues that it’s a healthy part of any church’s development to reproduce.
So the story is mixed. But somehow God still works out his purposes in the midst of our mess.
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[...] status of Protestant church planting in Australia. You can download the 2003 report here. This chart formatted by Steve Addison shows the size of a denomination (green) relative to others. The [...]