Reason for Church Planting: 1
1. God’s call and instruction
2. Extremely Effective Evangelism
3. Existing churches & organizations can introduce more people to Christ by starting new churches.
4. Church planting is an excellent forum for developing leaders to experience the adventure of faith that God is calling us all into.

The Need for Churches: 1
Population of Multnomah and Washington counties, according to the 2000 census, is 1,126,929. There are roughly 500 evangelical (groups that believe it is their responsibility to go forth and tell people about Jesus) churches in these counties. If each church could seat 300 people (some are smaller, some are larger) on average and every church was completely full (which they are usually not) that would be 150,000 people. In this best-possible-scenario we are still missing 976,929 people. If every one of those 500 churches planted a church tomorrow and each of them were instantly full (300 each), we’d still be missing more than 800,000 people. (Talk about no room at the Inn!)

Conservative Churches Grew Fastest in 1990s
Socially conservative churches that demand high commitment from their members grew faster than other religious denominations in the last decade, according to a study released yesterday by statisticians who count American religious affiliations every 10 years.
The study, “Religious Congregations and Membership: 2000” found that the fastest-growing religious denomination in the last 10 years was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which enlists thousands of young Mormon missionaries to recruit door to door and boosted its membership in the United States by 19.3 percent to a total of 4.2 million since the last survey in 1990.
The denominations that recorded the next highest growth were the conservative Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, with 18.6 percent (1.4 million); the Assemblies of God (2.5 million), a major Pentecostal denomination, with 18.5 percent, and the Roman Catholic Church (62 million), with 16.2 percent.
The study was conducted by Glenmary Research Center, sponsored by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, and is based on self-reported data (possibly imprecise due to inflation of numbers).
About half of Americans belong to one of the 149 religious groups included in the study. Utah, North Dakota and the District of Columbia, have the highest percentages of religious adherents, it found; Oregon and Washington have the lowest.

1. Justin Wolverton’s Church Plant Proposal, September 2003
2. New York Times on the Web www.nytimes.com, 9-18-02
3.

Justin Wolverton