Is Your Church Ready to Plant?
Church planting is exciting. It is also expensive, exhausting, and prone to failure. Before your church commits to planting, here is an honest assessment of whether you are ready.
The Three Things Every Planting Church Needs
1. Financial Stability (Not Wealth)
You do not need millions. But you need enough financial stability to support your existing ministry while also funding a new work. If your church is barely making it on its own budget, planting a church will not fix that math. It will make it worse.
Rule of thumb: Your church should be able to give 10 to 15% of its annual budget to the plant without cutting existing ministries. If that number is uncomfortable, you are not ready financially.
Use our Church Budget Calculator to evaluate your church’s financial health.
2. Leadership Depth
A church plant requires a team that does not yet exist. You need people willing to leave the mother church and help start something new. You need leaders who can serve in the plant while the planting pastor gets established.
If your church of 60 has only eight people who serve in any capacity, you do not have enough leadership depth to plant. Grow your leadership before you plant a church.
3. A Genuine Burden for the Unreached
Church planting based on church growth strategy will produce a church-growth church. Church planting based on a genuine burden for people who do not know Christ will produce a different kind of church.
Ask yourself honestly: are we planting because we want to grow, or because we want to reach people? Both are legitimate, but the second produces healthier churches.
What If You Are Not Ready?
Then do not plant. Not yet. Instead:
- Strengthen your current church. Our Church Health Assessment can help you identify areas to address.
- Grow your leadership. Use our Volunteer Management Guide to develop new leaders.
- Partner with an existing plant. Send money, people, and prayers to a church plant that is already underway.
- Pray for clarity. God’s timing is not always our timing.
Our Church Planting and Replanting Guide has a complete readiness assessment you can work through with your leadership team.
Brent Lacy is the founder of MinistryPlace and has worked with multiple church plants over 25 years of rural ministry.
Whether you’re planting a new church or revitalizing an existing one, the right foundation matters.
MinistryPlace.net offers church planting toolkits, replanting guides, and startup resources for rural and small-town contexts.