Multiplication Through Division: Rediscovering Reproduction Through Church Planting

Matthew Walker

For as long as I have been a pastor, nearly every time I have attended a pastor’s fellowship, someone has asked me, “How many people go to your church?” As a church planter — College Park Baptist Church began in January 2003 — I started answering that question by saying, “Oh, about six hundred.” When the person asking responded with surprise, I would add, “But only fifty of them show up on any given Sunday.”

In the two thousand years since Jesus founded the church, Christians have adopted a single metric for gauging church success: size. What I find remarkable is that out of the many times I have been asked about my church’s size, few have asked me about people being saved or the number of baptisms we have performed. No one has ever asked me, “How many churches has your church started?”

We need to rethink what makes a church successful. Too many believers value the size of a church regardless of whether it is fulfilling the missional mandate of Jesus. I believe the success of a church is measured not by how many it seats, but by how many churches it sends. Churches that are focused on Jesus’ mission may grow in size, but they will always maintain a corresponding emphasis on church planting.