Purpose Driven Planting

We live in the age of multiple choices. Everyday of our lives we are inundated with choices about everything, from what we drink to what we drive. The same myriad of options are available to anyone starting a new church today. From cell churches to post-modern churches to traditional churches to house churches, our options are endless. We even have options within the models, from leadership structure to worship style.

The many church planting models available to church planters today can present a daunting decision amid all the choices. The downside of so many options is the temptation to use the ‘smorgasbord approach’ with church planting and combine several models. The results are typically unfavorable, as the many models sometimes contradict one another, leaving the church planter dissatisfied and the new church ineffective. For that reason, find a model that resonates with you, study and pray through it, then commit and stand by your choice. You can adapt the model once you have a growing healthy church, but in order to get off the launch pad without a misfire, follow the model.

When my wife, Teddi, and I attended the Purpose Driven Church Conference in 1995, it was like trying to drink from a fire hydrant. With each successive session, our church strategy for our church, Church @ The Springs, crystallized. Rick Warren has a unique gift of making complex issues simple to understand. Purpose Driven was the model and process to drive the calling God put in our lives. Teddi and I were so excited. It felt like we had just been handed all the answers for an upcoming comprehensive final exam.

In a study of more than 600 church plants from 2000-2002, Ed Stetzer, missiologist for the North American Mission Board, reports that church planters who use the Purpose Driven model see the greatest impact on mean attendance over the other models. During the first four years, the mean attendance in a purpose driven church plant is nearly double the churches that are not purpose driven.

The statistics support Purpose Driven as the fastest growing model in church planting, but increasing numbers are not the only reason for starting a purpose driven church. In order to assist the church planter in making an educated decision, let’s explore the distinctives of a purpose driven church.

The purpose driven church is a biblical model
The purpose driven church is built around five biblical purposes. Dan Morgan, director of the Nehemiah Project for Church Planting, writes “God’s purposes for his church should be the dominant consideration in decisions about what the church does and how it organizes itself. A study of the Bible led Pastor Rick Warren to summarize God’s purposes for the Church into five overarching purposes anchored in two passages of Scripture. The Scripture passages are the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.” 

“Purpose Driven is not about seeker services. It is about evangelism. Purpose Driven is a process by which you bring people in through evangelism, raise them up through discipleship, train them for ministry, and send them out on mission to the glory of God,” Warren said.

We do not create the purpose for the Church; however, every generation of church leaders must rediscover God’s purposes. The purposes of the Church are found in the beginning of the New Testament Church in Jerusalem.

 “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” (Acts 2:42-47 NIV)

In the first church, we observe them teaching each other (Discipleship), enjoying fellowship together (Fellowship), worshipping together (Worship), ministering to the needs of people (Ministry), while people are being saved daily (Evangelism).

The purpose driven church advocates “crowd to core growth
This distinctive makes the Purpose Driven model a more effective approach for church planting. Most other models follow a core to crowd approach while starting a church. Begin, for example, with a small group of people meeting for Bible studies, and slowly grow the church from the inside out to reach the community. However, purpose driven churches are not planted from a core; they are launched from a crowd.

Warren teaches that it is easier to build a church from a crowd than it is to build a crowd from a church. For this reason, the weekend service is then designed to draw a crowd of people, creating an air of excitement. One of the largest complaints about the Church is that it is boring or irrelevant. The Church of the living Christ should be anything but boring and irrelevant. We should be capturing people’s attention with the amazing truth of God’s love for them, realizing that whatever gets your attention eventually gets you. We want people to walk out of the services saying, “I can’t wait for next week.” Once we capture their attention, we can capture their heart. The concentric circles below demonstrate the crowd to core process of a purpose driven church.
 
Start by reaching the community on the outer circle, and move them toward the core in the inner circle. Focus on the community and attract a crowd, turn the crowd into a congregation, the congregation into committed Christ-followers, and the committed into the core. The ultimate goal is to move people into deeper levels of commitment and send them back out to reach the community for Christ. As previously stated, it is easier to turn a crowd into a church than it is to turn a church into a crowd.

The purpose driven church focuses on reaching the lost
Jesus did not want his followers to lose sight of their purpose after he ascended. In Matthew 28:19–20, he gave them the Great Commission which says, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (NIV)

In line with Jesus’ teaching, purpose driven churches target hell-bound people. The ultimate for purpose driven churches is targeting people who are far from God. The already convinced Christian is not our target, but is welcome to join us as we reach the lost. We want to make it hard to go to Hell from Ocala. The people at The Springs know and understand that it takes unselfish people to reach the lost. Warren says it best in the first line from The Purpose Driven Life, “It’s not about you.”

Admittedly, the concept of targeting in regard to churches turned me off when I first heard it. It does tend to sound more like a marketing ploy rather than a church principle. My initial defenses went up immediately. I thought, God wants all people to come to know him, not just a targeted segment of the population.

Dan Morgan says, “The most common misconception about targeting is that it is a process of excluding people the planter doesn’t want to reach. Targeting is actually a process of determining who the planter can best reach first and most effectively, but welcoming all seekers and expecting target groups to multiply as the church grows.” Obviously, no church reaches everybody, which is why there is plenty of room for many different styles of churches, because God created all kinds of people. Effective churches focus on who they want to reach. In every church, there is a bulls-eye target, whether we want to admit it or not. The bulls-eye is who you can most effectively reach first. Certainly every target has larger outer rings around the bulls-eye, and as the church grows, so does the diversity of the congregation.

The purpose driven church has a simple path to maturity
Targeting the unchurched combined with focusing on attracting a weekend crowd usually results in rapid growth by evangelism. With rapid growth, a purpose driven church needs to quickly assimilate many new believers. Warren says, “don’t focus on growing a church with programs, focus on growing people with a process.”

Purpose driven churches use a method that follows a simple path to maturity, from seeker to reproducing disciple. The baseball diamond below is a visual of the spiritual growth process in a purpose driven church.

At each base, a class, initiating and representing a “next step” toward God, is taught on that particular purpose in the life of a Christ-follower. The goal is to move people into deeper levels of commitment, as they assimilate them into the life of the church. The simplicity and reproducibility of the Purpose Driven class system makes it simple for a church start to implement. People are encouraged to move systematically through the classes. First base is C.L.A.S.S. 101: Discovering Membership. Second base is C.L.A.S.S. 201: Discovering Spiritual Maturity. Third base is C.L.A.S.S. 301: Discovering Your Ministry. And home plate is C.LA.S.S. 401: Discovering Your Life Mission.
 
Once a member has attended all of the classes, they know the foundational purposes for their existence as a Christ-follower. As they learn in-depth each purpose, they weave their life deeper into the fabric of the local church and become closer to God. The classes are not for information, but for the transformation of their lives within the church. Each class is designed to move the Christ-follower to deeper commitment to Christ.

The purpose driven church is reproducible
The Purpose Driven model represents a paradigm shift for many in church planting circles. It is not simply a new methodology, but a renewed way of seeing the church in the 21st century. Not just a new church, but a rediscovery of a New Testament Church for this generation of church planters.

Not only is the Purpose Driven model reproducible and cross-cultural, it reproduces other churches as well. Simply put, a healthy purpose driven church starts other purpose driven churches. The Springs has started 10 other churches locally and nationally, and Saddleback started 25 churches in their first 15 years. The Purpose Driven model produces healthy churches and healthy churches reproduce.

Purpose driven churches are biblical, crowd to core, focused on reaching the lost, follow a simple path to maturity, and are reproducible no matter what city or culture you are called to reach for Christ. The Purpose Driven model is the most effective strategy for the 21st century church.

Ron Sylvia is the founding pastor of Church @ The Springs (thesprings.org) in Ocala, Fla. The Springs has grown from 21 to 2500 people in 10 years, and they have started eight daughter churches locally and nationally. The Springs won a Church Health Award in 1999.  Ron has trained thousands of church planters, nationally and internationally, to build purpose-driven churches. Ron is the author of Starting New Churches on Purpose (2006),  Starting High Definition Churches (2004) and the Launching Purpose Driven Churches Conference material.