How Do We Mix Church Growth With a New Paradigm of Multiplication?

Toronto planter Graham Singh shares how new eBook Spark surfaces important issues

Graham Singh

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How do we mix the church-growth perspective of the large North American church with a new paradigm of multiplication? Do we even know what multiplication looks like?
In the new eBook SPARK: Igniting a Culture of Multiplication (Exponential’s 2015 theme), Exponential Director Todd Wilson looks at the ways in which church growth paradigms dominate our expectations for church. He explains the reason we are seeing so many natural or inevitable glass ceilings in this kind of growth–and how easy it is for our newer church planting movements to fall into the same pattern.
I look at this eBook from two contexts:
1. The first is from my experience as an Anglican minister & church planter in the Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB – home of Alpha) network in the United Kingdom, where God allowed us to re-open 45 church buildings in the context of more than 8,000 having closed nationally. We had experienced multiplication in the UK all right–but with a negative integer! For at least two generations, we sat and watched the traditional models of church failing–only too late did we really wake up to the collapse of huge portions of the massive Church of England.  It was from that context (a lot of fear) that HTB’s church planting began, but was in many ways discouraged or even prevented by our denomination from having long-term control instruments. In other words, we were forced to release every plant to denominational oversight, rather than through our own network.  Or so it may have seemed!
In reading SPARK, I realize that what may have seemed a little cruel at the time was actually part of the secret sauce of HTB’s success–sending churches that had to be able to multiply themselves, because HTB simply  could not keep planting so many seeds, directly. In this context, multiplication has begun to happen, and I  pray that this year’s theme at Exponential will really help our network learn how to press the gas pedal (they  don’t call it that in the UK, but go with me here) even further, and see more plants planting plants who plant. Of HTB’s 45 plants, about half are plants from other plants already.
2. The other context is from where I’m serving now, in a large evangelical church near Toronto. We are an awesome mix of Willow Creek + Alpha + Celebrate Recovery. This church exploded in my small home town, and we stayed in touch via the Alpha network. We felt God calling our family to come back here to help out, and my HTB and Church of England leaders were gracious enough to give me a “hall pass” to head back and share what we had learned. At Lakeside, we see around 2,500 people at weekend services and 500-plus families per month coming through our care centre for food, clothing, haircuts and free dentistry. We are having so much fun as a church! So much so, that two years ago we thought we should buy an old downtown building from one of our mainline church friends,for $1 million.  Our whole church got so excited about this, and we raised the money fairly quickly. But now, raising money for other stuff is kinda … well, hard! We have so loved this adventure, but we can’t keep planting this way and the massive investment we made has given us an inbuilt hesitation to release what we’ve built:

• What if things drift?
• Why is there such strain on “our DNA?”
• Are we multisite?
• Is multisite good/bad/neutral?
• Where does leadership sit?

Help! Take us to a Leadership Network seminar–or give us a book on multiplication!
SPARK speaks right into our situation. This book, in a pre-elder-board-meeting-sized format, opens up some of the most important issues we as a sending/sent church mix need to be grappling with. My hope for our team is that this book will help whet the appetites for a much wider range of leadership in our church, beyond those who are already focused on church planting, and that we can learn together how to manage these tensions, into awesomeness.
Download your FREE copy of SPARK: Igniting a Culture of Multiplication here. 

Graham Singh is a church planter and speaker in the Toronto Area. He has an awesome blog that he accidentally deleted. His favourite project is a new Canadian Church Buildings Pact, which aims to bring Anglican, United (Methodist), Presbyterian and Catholic denominations together with more reformed and other planting networks, in learning about what to do with hundreds of closing church buildings in Canada. Follow him on Twitter @revgrahamsingh