Making Church Plants Thrive in 2008

A few months ago I had the privilege of compiling research conducted by Ed Stetzer and publishing it in a series of articles for Leadership Network. These articles grew out of the exhaustive research that Ed did last year on the state of church planting in the U.S. Ed's research was outstanding (as usual). These 4 articles are available for download at www.leadnet.org. or you can contact me directly at glenn@nciglobal.org.

One of the articles had to do with Health and Survivability of New Churches. Ed's research combined with Stephen Gray's new book Planting Fast Growing Churches gives us some great insight on how to make church plants thrive in 2008. Over the next few weeks that is what I want to write about.

To help us start thinking this week, here are a few of the findings:

• The chances of survivability increases by over 400% when the church planter has a "realistic" understanding and expectation of the church-planting experience.
• The odds of survivability increase by over 250% where leadership development training is offered in the plant.
• The odds of survivability increase by 178% when there is a proactive stewardship development plan within the church plant.

These are just a few of the things we have learned this past year and are incorporating into our training and coaching systems at NCI. Stay tuned for more!