What wakes our team up in the morning is the desire to see the gospel preached across the country and the world! 

For me, Clayton, each time I go to a new city and I see people walking down the street or crossing the road, I can’t help but think…. Do they have a gospel preaching church to go to? Do they even have a friend who goes to a gospel preaching church? 

It makes me think of this girl Lauren who was in school near the Collaborative Church I helped plant in Wilmington, NC. Lauren was getting baptized and just before she got into the water we showed a video. And in that video I distinctly remember her saying, “For all of my life I thought religion was about what I could do for God, now I know that the gospel is about what God did for me.” 

That is why we plant churches. So Lauren can hear that message. Thousands of Laurens, Jeffs, and Seans. 

In fact, in our march towards planting 1,000 churches, we recently had a huge milestone! In the last year, we have seen over 1,000 baptisms, just like Lauren, at Collaborative Churches! 

We want you to partner with us to plant more churches, so stories like this can be told over and over again. 

At this point, we have over 70 churches collaborating together to plant more churches. In the span of the last 13 years, we have seen a 94% success rate in the churches that we plant. That is almost double the success rate some studies show of church survival. Even more amazing, 8 of those churches have exploded and are now over 500 people in attendance on an average weekend, two of those are above 2,000 on the weekend, and 1 of those often crosses 3,000 people in attendance.

We believe that God is telling a beautiful story of kingdom growth and multiplication in the Collaborative. As we look back on what God has done and try to understand how he is working, we think that there are a few things about our strategy that are particularly important.

1. We Identify Leadership Through Relationships. This means we try very hard not to take cold calls of people who want to plant churches. Most of our plants are coming from within our churches or at least through referral from one of our pastors. It is very helpful to know and see someone’s work over years in order to have confidence that God is moving in their life the way they say He is.

2. We Support Each Other Like Family. Rather than resourcing all our churches from a central staff, we like to connect our pastors and have them encourage and equip one another. Their experience is worth far more than our opinion, and it helps us strategically keep our central team lean. Being on the journey together helps our pastors and leaders fight the loneliness that often comes with church planting.

3. We Champion Multiplication. We are convinced that a group of churches training a church planter is better than one church doing that training alone. Multiple voices coming from multiple different contexts helps a new planter develop a more robust and resilient vision with the same core DNA. This type of collaboration is also helpful for each of our churches as many different churches are supporting them financially.

As our family of churches has grown and we continue to assess future leaders, we have found that a greater percentage of our planters are coming from the staff of our existing churches. That means we are able to plant more churches per year than we used to and a large percent of our plants are actually granddaughter and great granddaughter churches. It’s wild!

The odd thing about all of this is that, in North America, the current narrative is that there is more money ready to plant churches than there are leaders ready to do the planting. 

In the Summit Collaborative, we have the opposite problem. 

We are looking for aunts and uncles to join our family by helping us build an endowment fund. 

In the next 5 years, we are going to need a warchest of money ready to fund each of our church plants. Then, as all of our existing churches continue to mature, we find that their giving back to the Collaborative actually continues to build that fund, so we can continue to increase in the number of churches we can plant. 

We just need that head start. We need to be ready. 

Will you join us? If you are ready to give, you can do that here.

If you are interested in more information or would like to visit a Collaborative Church to see the movement in action, please email our director, Clayton Greene, at clayton@summitcollaborative.org.