For a while, it looked like the church-planting party was over. Numbers from the past few years tell us it’s not.
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For a while, it looked like the church-planting party was over.
Back in the 2000s and 2010s, everyone was there. In 2001, Tim Keller founded City to City. In 2005, Mark Driscoll took over Acts 29. In 2008, the Pillar Network was born; in 2010, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) officially cannonballed in with what would become the Send Network. Harbor Network followed in 2011.
“The energy and enthusiasm about church planting in North America is at an unprecedented high,” missiologist Ed Stetzer and researcher Warren Bird wrote in 2008. Young men with beards and flannel shirts, inspired by the brashness of Driscoll and the brains of Keller, grabbed their Bibles and headed to the city centers—historically among the most difficult places to start a church.
But within a decade or two, the hype faded.
“A lot of great churches were planted, but a lot of people in that first wave also crashed and burned,” said Noah Oldham, executive director of Send Network. “Marriages fell apart, families fell apart, church planting teams had disasters.”
At the same time, the pipeline of young men dried up.
“Because it kind of happened out of nowhere, every college pastor, associate pastor, or student pastor that was hungry, ready, and gifted planted churches,” Oldham said. Once they were all sent out, “there was no backfill.”
Indeed, interest in pastoring seemed to be waning across the board. In 2017, the number of MDiv degree-seekers at evangelical seminaries began to drop.
“All this is coming together—an anxious generation, a higher degree of fragility, a lessening of resilience because of overprotection,” said Chris Vogel, church planting and vitality coordinator for the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). “A lot of the shift was students moving from wanting to be the pastor of a church to wanting to be ordained to be a counselor.”
It looked like the planting party was over.
And then, around 2021, Send Network’s numbers began to creep back up. Pretty soon, Acts 29 was seeing the same thing.
“Two years ago, we had 125 men in the planting pipeline,” Acts 29 vice president of church planting Adam Flynt said. “Today, that’s over 450 guys. In two years, it more than tripled.”
The PCA wasn’t far behind.
“In 2025, the PCA began 54 new works,” Vogel said. “That’s the highest number in 20 years.”These aren’t anomalies—church plants for all Protestant congregations rose significantly between 2019 and 2024.
It’s another party—but this one looks less like a solo planter experimenting with Bible studies in a bar and more like well-supported teams reading books about best practices. The participants are older, moving slower, and more likely to appreciate assessment and accountability.
That hasn’t been a bad thing.
“We are seeing not only the number of plants go up, but the survivability rate has increased as well,” Oldham said.
“I’m very encouraged,” Vogel said. “I think we’re at the precipice of a really good change.”
Seeker Sensitive in the Suburbs
“The last time we saw a significant number of new churches was after World War II,” Vogel said.
That’s because the large number of returning men—and the enormous number of the children they were producing—led to a housing crisis. As houses went up in the newly created suburbs around American cities, churches soon followed.
“During this period, the operative term was not so much ‘planting’ as it was ‘extension,’” Stetzer wrote. “Specific churches would partner with their denomination to extend new churches into a given area.”
Chris Vogel planted Cornerstone Church in a Milwaukee suburb in 1992. / Courtesy of Chris Vogel
But as American culture became more individualistic, so did church planting. Focus shifted from the church to the planter, Stetzer said.
This entrepreneurial focus naturally bent toward pragmatism and professionalism. Church leaders talked about the homogenous unit principle (people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers) and seeker sensitivity (church services “designed to appeal to the unchurched, non-Christian, in an attempt to draw them into the church community where they might receive the gospel and be converted”). Those ideas soon went too far, leading to therapeutic preaching, numbers-based definitions of success, and businesslike leadership development summits.
The problems with running a church like a Fortune 500 company were so apparent that pushback arrived in multiple forms.
One of them was the Reformed movement.
Perfect Timing
In the 2000s, young men with early internet connections began to discover the doctrines of grace, expositional preaching, and the Puritans. Soon, dynamic preachers such as Piper, Keller, and Driscoll began challenging young men to use that knowledge to plant churches.
“Guys are getting this hunger: What if we could start churches like that?” Oldham said. “And the denominations and networks were saying, ‘You can.’ And the money began to come in. The timing was perfect.”
Back then, potential planters were plentiful.
“One reason was the maturing of youth ministry,” Flynt said. “Having a youth pastor was a relatively young endeavor in the church—that didn’t really occur until after the Jesus Movement in the late ’60s or early ’70s.”
It turned out to be a great place for pastoral training.
“After 10 or 20 years, you’ve done a lot of things that a senior pastor does, just on a smaller scale and with a new generation,” Flynt said. “You teach weekly, organize groups, go on trips, raise up leaders, manage budgets. The advent and maturing of youth ministry was almost like an incubator for that early push of church plantings.”
Their childhood culture also helped. The youth and associate pastors of the 2000s and 2010s were the tail end of Gen X (the least-parented, latchkey cohort) and the front end of the millennials (the confident, eager to lead generation).
“There was an independence, a ‘don’t tell me I can’t do that’ streak in that group,” Flynt said. There was also the zeal of the newly converted—Reformed blogger Tim Challies remembers that “it was like 1 million people were all in cage-stage Calvinism at the same time.”
“There was a missional vigor that rose up,” Flynt said. “They wanted to do hard things.”
Planting Hard
One of the most difficult things you can do in ministry is to plant a church. If you want to make it even harder, try planting a church in the center of a city, where religious affiliation is low and violent crime rates are high.
Not enough of a challenge for you? Try doing it alone, without a team.
“The first 8 to 10 years were like the Wild West,” Oldham said. “There was no accountability, because there was no real oversight. Networks didn’t fully exist.”
Noah Oldham launching August Gate Church in the St. Louis metro area in 2009 / Courtesy of Noah Oldham
Even as they began to develop, networks didn’t necessarily offer comfort or security.
“The night before I got assessed with my previous network, one of the guys sticks his finger in my chest and says, ‘Wear a cup,’” Oldham said. “And then he looks at my wife and says, ‘Bring tissues.’ So what he just told me was he was going to kick me in the crotch and make my wife cry—these godly men who are going to assess my calling to start a church.”
Things started rough and got rougher.
“I would come to church-planting events, and I’d almost always hear the same thing,” Oldham said. “They’d say, ‘Church planting is hard and difficult. It almost killed me. Don’t do it like me.’”
But of course, the implicit—and sometimes explicit—message was: Do it exactly like him. Stay up late. Get up early. Work so hard you make yourself sick. If you can do it with almost no money or support, that’s even better.
Surprisingly, none of this deterred the church planters of the early 2000s.
In 11 years, Acts 29 went from 23 churches to 550. City to City funded and trained another 300. The PCA was planting about 50 churches a year; the SBC was adding around 1,000 annually.
Others caught the party fever too—in 2000, several nondenominational pastors started the Association of Related Churches and were averaging around 50 plants a year by 201
