In the area of the church that I serve in we have tried many different ways to start new churches. There is some technical lingo here, but new churches come from parachute drops to the cathedral model and everything in between. While there is a much training that goes into the new church and new church pastor, there is not a lot of support from other local churches to the new church.
There are a number of reasons why local churches don't support new church starts. Perhaps the most insidious of the reasons is the unspoken theology that guides many of our actions: the theology of scarcity. More commonly called "Zero Sum" thinking, the theology of scarcity is the idea that if one church supports another church then the original church will suffer. There is only so many people or resources that if one church were to give up some of theirs to benefit the other church, then one church would win at the expense of another loosing.
So how do we combat the theology of scarcity in supporting new church starts? Might we look to the tech world and specifically to the Y Combinator.
You can read more about the Y Combinator here. But here is a sense of what it might look like:
- Recruit pastors/churches who want to start a new church or campus
- Enroll them in a 10 week intensive course where they work on getting it all set up
- Weekly dinners with specific keynote speakers who are experts in an area
- Regular Office hours with coaches, mentors and leaders
- Pitch the new church model at a gathering (Annual Conference?) where other pastors or church leaders can see the vision and the work done so far.
- Leaders and churches can invest money or people into the new church, becoming partners to the new church
- New church receives support and resources from a partner and the partner receives things in return depending on their level of investment/support.
There is more to this but I hope you get the gist. The goal would be to see to it that potential partners have a reason to "buy in" and support the new church so as to combat the theology of scarcity/Zero sum.