Customer Reviews

Spin-Off Churches: How One Church Successfully Plants Another

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There has been much written on church planting lately. However, most of the church planting books focus on how to start a church from the founding pastor / church planter perspective. Cheyney, Harrison and Overstreet have produced the must-have guide for pastors and churches that need to know how to spin-off new churches. This book not only provides answers to the most common questions and objections to church planting, it is a great how-to resource.

Spin-Off Churches is another church planting book. The reason for reading this one is that the authors are able glean from various methodologies and research and digest that data into one book.

Here were a few helpful insights:

One of the key objections to starting new churches in a city is that the new church would create competition with existing churches. The book points out that an additional church may be exactly what the city needs. The reality of additional healthy churches in a city is actually a positive force in improving all the churches in a city.

As a church considers how to use its kingdom resources, they should know that investments in church planning often go father in reaching people than investments in other church expenditures. The cost of adding new congregants is often lower in church starts than in adding programs to existing churches.

The practice of starting new churches often adds more to a sponsoring church that it takes away. The value of renewed ministry focus and vision, prayer, and leadership development that is created in the sponsoring church offsets the financial and personnel investments they make in starting a new church.

One disagreement was with the authors' idea that new churches should move forward only with unanimous and personal agreement of every church member. While there is value in the unity that comes from unanimous decisions, churches should not position themselves where immature or fringe believers are able to keep a church from moving forward. An elder led congregational church government systems is one solution to this problem.

For leaders of churches who are getting started in church planting ministry, this book is for you. The book has a good balance between theory and practice and contains enough helpful ideas in each chapter that anyone interested in church planting should benefit from the book.

There are numerous books now available on how to plant churches, covering many different styles of churches. However, there have not been many resources specifically designed for churches which want to sponsor the planting of other churches. This is a book which aims to address this issue.

Part 1 of the book covers the fundamentals of sponsoring churches. Part 2 covers attitudes towards sponsorship. Part 3 provides advice on finding a church model that fits. Part 4 describes the phases of new church development. Part 5 relates to finding the resources. Part 6 relates to the relationship between the sponsoring church and the new church. Part 7 describes ways of promoting the idea of becoming a sponsoring church.

The book contains plenty of useful material, but like most books written by multiple authors, although it contains many interesting details, I found it fairly heavy going as a whole. I think it would be useful to churches which are already excited about planting other churches, but it is unlikely to be sufficiently inspiring to capture the imagination of others.

This book is the greatest book I have seen on the HOW TO's of planting a church from the perspective of a sponsoring/partnering church.

Length:: 7:56 Mins