Each USMB church plant has a unique story. Although there are some common strategies and industry-standard “best practices” when planting a church, each congregation is unique in the ways God orchestrates their history.
Looking ahead, USMB continues to value church planting as a core commitment. As we dream and pray for more new churches to be planted, it’s helpful to look at three current, thriving MB church plants to see how they differ and where we can find common threads of success. All three demonstrate God’s faithfulness in unique communities and individualized strategies.
Ridgepoint Church: The right time
“Every church ought to be doing something with church planting,” says Brent Warkentin, lead pastor of Ridgepoint Church, formerly First MB Church, Wichita, Kansas. “Every church at some point was a church plant, so being against church planting is kind of being against yourself.”
Ridgepoint, founded in 1943, is large and financially stable, but even with these advantages, it struggled to launch a new church.
Ridgepoint first attempted a church plant in the mid-1980s, when a small group of leaders began a Bible study on the east side of Wichita, several miles away from the primary campus in west Wichita. East Wichita Fellowship saw some initial success, growing from 10 to 20 people to a peak of 75 people meeting on the Wichita State University campus. They hired a pastor and saw some growth, but eventually the church closed.
“They never really sustained a critical mass of attendance and they were always always on the cusp of financial ruin,” Warkentin says. “One of the critical lessons was they never had people who were part of the community. They had good intentions, but it just never gained traction.”
In November 2010, Ridgepoint leaders brought the idea of a church plant to the annual church family meeting. Despite passionate pleas from Warkentin and the church’s leadership board, the vote to plant a church failed by literally one vote, the only failed congregational vote in Ridgepoint’s 81-year history.
“I was obviously disappointed, but I just don’t think it was the right time,” Warkentin says. “We saw it as a ‘not yet’ vote more than a ‘no’ vote. I wasn’t giving up, but felt kind of lost as to how we were going to do this with round three.”
Nearly a decade later, the dream came back to life when in 2019 the church was unexpectedly given a church building in south Wichita. Ridgepoint hired Andy Owen, former MB missionary and church planter in Thailand, to help in their church planting ventures. Kevin Friedberg was hired as the church planter, and through a series of miraculous events, Ridgepoint launched SouthLife Church in April 2021.
SouthLife serves a lower-income neighborhood, which looks drastically different than the community surrounding Ridgepoint, and has grown from an initial group of 25 to more than 100 attending on Sunday mornings.
Although it took three attempts and the path wasn’t what Ridgepoint anticipated, Warkentin is thankful for God’s provision.
“You have to trust the story,” he says. “You have to trust that the Lord knows what he’s doing. God has been so good, and he pulled off some things that we couldn’t have scripted ahead of time. We’re grateful.”
Lighthouse Church: Empower for leadership
Just a few miles from SouthLife Church is Lighthouse Church, another MB church plant in a similar—but also very different—area of Wichita.
Lighthouse was founded in 1999, through World Impact, an urban ministry dedicated to evangelism and discipleship with a campus in Wichita, and in cooperation with the Southern District Conference. World Impact targeted geographical areas where they could intentionally serve those facing poverty and chose the Oaklawn neighborhood, known as a historically “rough” area with high crime and drug activity, for a church plant.
“We’ve had a lot of homeless and just a lot of brokenness—people coming out of jails and drug recovery,” says Jerry Wilhite, current Lighthouse pastor. “We try to disciple and bring recovery to them and love them. One of our goals is to empower people to become leaders and fulfill the calling God has for them no matter what their past is.”
Local World Impact leaders Darren Busenitz and Matthew Penner were the first Lighthouse staff members, with a strategic focus on starting kids clubs. Steady growth with the kids ministry eventually brought in the parents, and soon adult Bible studies and small groups were formed.
This group met for their first formal service in a community center around 2001, hired Wilhite full-time in 2008 and moved into their own building in 2015.
Lighthouse is intentional about meeting the physical needs of its neighbors. The church housed a free medical clinic for 10 years and ran a successful “Giving Center” where community members could get free food and clothing. The annual “Turkey Toss” provided free Thanksgiving meals to 400 neighbors.
When the church started, weekly attendance was around 25 to 30 people. That grew to nearly 100 people right before the COVID pandemic, and today attendance is about 60 people.
Wilhite admits he has struggled over the years with the concept of “success” as their congregation hasn’t necessarily grown numerically.
“I was prepared for nothing like what I was running into here,” he says. “But the Holy Spirit spoke to me, and I came to realize that if you’re real with people and you have the love of Jesus, you can cross any boundary and love them where they’re at.”
Wilhite has learned to be at peace with the fact that Lighthouse will not become a large congregation. He has dozens of stories of homeless neighbors coming to Lighthouse to be discipled, overcoming addiction and paving a new way forward.
“God is calling me to be faithful, not successful in the eyes of the world,” he says. “We have opportunities to deal with people one-on-one, and people open up about real problems. So, I think that is success, having people trust you with their life and showing them what God has for them.”
Lakeview Church: A safe place to explore
Phil Wiebe first felt a call toward church planting in 2012. At the time, he was working with the youth ministry at South Mountain Community Church in St. George, Utah.
“I felt Jesus putting on my heart to plant a church. I didn’t know what it meant or what it looked like,” Wiebe says.
After taking a break from work and ministry to process the unexpected death of his firstborn and returning to a different church and another role, Wiebe felt a new and stronger tug toward church planting.
God gave Wiebe a vivid picture of the messes he would encounter as a church planter as well as what Wiebe describes as a strange but comforting experience. For 40 consecutive days, Wiebe received various types of confirmation from people in his life that he was supposed to plant a church and in a very specific location.
“This is the only prophetic experience I’ve had in my Christian faith, but it was very clear, and it was very specific,” he says. “We were to plant a church in Tooele County (Utah). God said, ‘Phil, I’m working on people’s hearts in Tooele County. I’m inviting you to come be a part of it. I’m going to do it with or without you, but I’m inviting you to be a part of it.’”
Tooele County provided unique challenges and opportunities for this new church plant, since the county was only 0.84 percent evangelical. The community was overwhelmingly involved with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, although a shift was coming.
Large numbers of people had been leaving the LDS church, and many of those became either atheist or agnostic. The newly formed Lakeview Church had a very specific goal: become the kind of place where these people will find a welcoming community and a safe place to explore faith.
“It’s amazing how many people have been hurt and destroyed by the Mormon Church, but they want a relationship with God,” Wiebe says.
Recent survey and census data shows the percentage of evangelical Christians in this county has now surpassed 1 percent of the population, and Lakeview Church has a significant part of that increase. Wiebe estimates that more than 300 people in the area now consider themselves Christians because of the outreach of Lakeview.
The church launched with around 85 people, grew to about 240 in 2019, and recently had more than 500 attend a special five-year anniversary service. To capitalize on the growth, Lakeview planted a second campus in Grantsville, Utah, in 2021.
Trust the story
As Warkentin says, church planting involves learning to “trust the story.” Whether ministering to former LDS members in Utah or lower-income neighborhoods in Kansas, church planters discover unexpected hurdles along the way. However, there seems to be at least one consistent variable among successful church plants.
“The right way to do a church plant is to know what is needed in the area God has put you in,” Wiebe says. “Jesus said, ‘I’m going to teach you to be fishers of men.’ That’s what being a disciple is. I don’t know any fishermen who go to the lake with no strategy or plan. When it comes to church planting, unless you know what you’re fishing for, you’re just on a cruise ship going across a pond.”
Ultimately, each church plant is a testament to God’s faithfulness and creativity. Each congregation has a vital role to play in God’s eternal story.
Matt Ehresman is the host of LEAD Pods, the USMB podcast. This article is based on an upcoming podcast.
Matt Ehresman has served as the media/graphic design/communications/web/video/social media staff member at First MB Church, Wichita, Kansas, since June 2013. He graduated from Sterling College in 2010 with a degree in graphic communications, and went on to get his master’s in digital media from Regent University in 2012. Before coming to First MB, he worked on a television show for Focus on the Family and in the marketing office at Sterling College. He lives with his wife, Tillie, and their mischievous dog, Jarvis.
