Success Factors in Fast Growing Plants

I highly recommend Steven Gray's new book Planting Fast Growing Churches. Stephen compared 60 fast growing church plants and 52 struggling church plants to try to understand the factors that enabled churches to grow larger than 200 in their first three years. Here are a few of the things that he found.

• 88% of the fast growing churches had church planting teams
• 63% of the fast growing churches had an initial core group of 26 or more
• 80% put ten percent or more of their budgets toward outreach and evangelism
• 63% of planters leading fast growing plants raise additional funding, compared to 23% of those that are struggling
• 57% of the fast-growing church plants teach financial stewardship during the first six months from public launch; by contrast only 40% of strugling church plants teach financial stewardship.

I would encourage every church planter to study Stephen's book. I would also encourage everyone to go to www.leadnet.org and download the church planting article "Improving the Health and Survivability of New Churches."