Rethinking Church Planting: From Maximalism to Minimalism
Why the future of church planting depends on simplicity, not scale.
I’ve been blessed to sit in many church-planter training and assessment processes where people talk about what makes a great church planter. In the prevailing model of church planting in North America, the expectations placed on planters are incredibly high, and only a small number of people ever make it through an assessment process.
Unfortunately, this approach tends to select against some of our most eager, passionate, and flexible potential planters: young people. There are so many incredible emerging leaders who could start new churches if the ecclesial paradigm were adjusted toward simplicity.
The Maximalist Model
Typically, the assumption is that a new church should reach financial self-sufficiency within three years, which usually means building a community of at least one hundred people who give regularly. But the skills required to start and grow a community from zero to one hundred in that timeframe are highly specific. They include team leadership, public speaking, fundraising, organizational management, budgeting, charity law, and a solid grounding in doctrine and theology alongside excellent cultural exegesis. It’s a pretty tough ask.
This is what I call a maximalist approach to church planting. It’s risky, expensive, and difficult to reproduce consistently. From both a leadership identification perspective, it’s challenging because the bar for success is set so high that only a few can ever meet it without considerable life experience. From a financial perspective, the approach requires substantial investment and a rapid growth rate. Both of these combine to mean that many churches will struggle to finance new plants and find it difficult to cultivate leaders that meet all of hte criteria.
Where there are leaders who bring the character, competencies and commitment to make the maximalist approach work, it can produce fantastic fruit for the kingdom. I am aware of numerous examples where the “launch big” strategy has yielded significant success, including with dear friends.
However, what if we were to consider an approach that would enable young leaders to begin with simplicity and gradually grow into the role over several years, as the church family expands through disciple-making?
Asking a Different Question
So, this leads to a bit of a different question: What are the minimal skills required for someone to plant a church? What would a minimalist church planting methodology look like?
In the New Testament, we see two primary ways churches were started:
Evangelists going to new regions to preach the Gospel (Acts 13–14).
Ordinary believers sharing the Gospel and opening their lives to others (Acts 8:1,4).
Eventually, the evangelistic approach gives way to the second approach: everyday believers making disciples. This is where we see movements begin to multiply (see Acts 14).
The baseline criteria seem remarkably simple: If someone can share the Gospel and faithfully make disciples, they can probably start a small church. If they are excellent evangelists, they might be able to move faster, but they’ll probably need to pass it off to the people they reached anyway, as Paul did in Acts 14. His giftings allowed for quick growth, but the churches he started were passed to new believers quite quickly so that he could move on.
So, rather than starting with a vision for a large, self-sustaining congregation, we could begin with the goal of raising leaders who can lead small, missional churches. Over time, as these leaders mature and are equipped through intentional training and teaching, those small churches can grow and multiply.
If we can raise leaders who share the Gospel and invite others to do the same, the natural outcome will be both healthy local churches and new leaders sent out.
This is the story of our church. We regularly raise and send out people in their early 20s to start churches. They go with tremendous relational backing, but minimal financial support and very simple objectives in the first few years: evangelize and make disciples. The emphasis is on spiritual family, evangelism, and disciple-making rather than institution-building.
A Call to Prayer and Fasting
In January, we are sending two teams to two new cities, and we’re praying for at least one more team to be formed in 2026. Our longing is to see a generation of ordinary people embrace this simple, biblical vision for multiplying the Gospel.
Next week, we are taking time to pray and fast that the Lord would call and raise up young leaders to go to new places and start small, evangelical, and missional churches. We hope that these new churches will mature into vibrant communities of faith that send others to do the same.
The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. So, we pray the Lord of the harvest to send more workers.
Great post, Robin!