Geographic Church Planting Strategies: Acts 29 vs ARC
For those folks who only take a casual interest in religion, I want to make you aware of a fascinating trend that is happening in Protestant Christianity that you probably haven’t heard much about - church planting networks. (For the uninitiated, the process of starting a new church from scratch is called a “plant”).
These networks have been specifically organized to make it easier for eager young pastors to be connected to the resources that they need to plant churches quickly and effectively. While every network is a little bit different in how it approaches this process, here’s a quick breakdown of how it usually goes.
A young person (almost always a man), determines that God has called him to plant a church.
He applies to a church planting network.
They take him through a screening process. Sometimes it’s a week long retreat, other times it’s a series of weekends over a longer period of time. The planting network evaluates his ability to lead and administer a new church plant. (Some require that wives attend these screenings, too, by the way).
If approved, the church planting network then gives that individual some seed money to begin, but also gives them a continuing stream of funds in the start up phase. It’s typically three years, but can vary.
The planter uses those funds to secure a space, audio/video equipment, and other necessities and then starts a church.
If the church is successful it is strongly encouraged for that church to then designate a portion of their offering to go back to the network and fund the planting of new churches. They also want those pastors to attend training events that are organized by the planting network.
I highly recommend this podcast series from Gimlet Media where they followed a church planter over the period of a year. It goes into a tremendous amount of detail about what it feels like to try and hold a church together. The Wall Street Journal ran a story about this back in May. The title was, “God Inc.—Church Startups Spread Franchise Model Across U.S.” I may have suggested this topic to Francis Rocca, the primary reporter on the story.
The way I see it, there are three primary church planting networks.
The Association of Related Churches (ARC). According to the WSJ’s reporting, ARC was founded in 2001. By 2009, it was launching fifty churches a year and last year they poured $7 million into new church plants. They provide matching funds of up to $100,000 for planters as a no-interest loan. According to ARC, 90% of their churches survive the first five years.
The Acts 29 Network. Acts 29 was founded to be a planting network for churches who adhere to Calvinist theology. They were launched in 1998 by a guy you may heard of - Mark Driscoll. However, Driscoll was removed from leadership in 2014. I did a pretty thorough internet search to try and pull together more information about Acts 29. What comes up is a lot of scandals and issues with accountability.
The Send Network. Send is different because it is explicitly tied to a denomination - the Southern Baptist Convention. More specifically, it’s an offshoot of the North American Mission Board. According to their website, they have planted over 10,000 churches throughout North America. They are also really transparent about the process of planting a church with Send.
What I wanted to do for this post was a spatial analysis of where these church planting networks decide to start new churches. I know that it’s typically the planters themselves who decide where to start a new ministry, but I wanted to see if these networks are just setting up shop right next to each and competing for new converts, or if they have staked out different geographic regions in the United States.
To do that, I just scraped the data from the church planting network websites. But there was a problem with Send Network - they don’t really post the names and addresses of their churches anywhere. They have a map here with pins on it, but that’s all I could find. I have had some conversations with folks in leadership at Send and they have told me that they don’t make the list of their churches public, so I am not going to be able to include them. But I can certainly focus on ARC and Acts 29. So, let’s get to it.
The first thing to note is that ARC has a whole lot more churches listed on their website compared to Acts 29. It’s important to mention that ARC includes both ARC church plants but also churches that joined the ARC network after planting on their website, so that does boost the number a bit for them. But currently there are 1,244 ARC affiliated churches across the United States. In comparison, there are only 393 who are listed with Acts 29. For what it’s worth, a few churches have publicly left Acts 29 in the last couple of years.
But where are they geographically? The map below visualizes the location of both ARC and Acts 29 churches across the contiguous 48 United States.