Church planting has long been a stated priority of the U.S. Conference of MB Churches. Over the years, USMB has set ambitious church growth goals using various strategies. Some of these goals have been met and others have not, including the most recent goal set in 2016 which aimed to see USMB’s 198 churches grow to 300 by 2025.
While growth has happened, it hasn’t happened as exponentially as leaders hoped. Today, USMB has 219 churches.
National Director Aaron Box believes that churches focused on evangelism and discipleship will by nature grow and expand. By 2030, he would like to have the pieces in place to sustain five to 10 new USMB churches per year, provided local churches commit to the mission and consistently identify leaders.
“One of the things we can see looking back at the seasons where we’ve had success is we need to not be afraid to lean into those ambitious places that feel beyond us, because that’s actually exactly where we’re supposed to be,” Box says.
Mission USA takes new approach
Today’s emphasis on planting churches is rooted in a national U.S. Mennonite Brethren vision adopted in the late 1980s that focused the work of evangelism on planting new churches “within and across cultural lines.” The intent was to reach beyond traditional boundaries and backgrounds in national church planting efforts and to grow from 125 to 180 churches by the year 2000.
In 1994, the formation of Mission USA, USMB’s church planting and renewal ministry, ramped up the church planting focus. Thanks to Mission USA and an initiative known as Integrated Ministries, which focused on planting and integrating immigrant congregations, by 2000, the conference numbered 172 churches, just eight shy of the goal.
In 2000, MetroNet 2005 was introduced, with a goal of planting 20 new MB congregations in metropolitan areas in five years. But funding challenges leading to the resignation of Mission USA executive director Ed Boschman in 2002 derailed this plan.
In 2004, with Don Morris as director, Mission USA resumed an aggressive church planting strategy. In 2012, Morris met his goal of planting six new churches that year. This success prompted a dream to plant 60 churches in the next 10 years. As a new USMB vision, known as the Future Story, materialized, that dream grew even bigger.
A new vision, organization
While conversations surrounding a new national vision for church planting were happening, leaders shifted the responsibility for carrying out the Future Story’s church growth goals from Mission USA to a new organization, Multiply. This mission agency, supported by U.S. and Canadian Mennonite Brethren, would facilitate church planting locally, nationally and globally.
Mission USA had served as USMB’s church planting arm for 20 years when it was closed in 2016. That year, Morris reported 29 new churches were in existence because of Mission USA.
“It was pretty ambitious that we would grow to 300 churches, but the whole Future Story was pretty ambitious,” says Morris, who also served as USMB national director. “Some of that was the realization of, ‘Let’s have a big, audacious goal.’”
Unfortunately, within five months of the new organization’s launch, the plan proved unsuccessful, and by September 2019, USMB’s national church planting partnership with Multiply had ended.
The COVID-19 pandemic did nothing to aid USMB’s church planting efforts. Although church planting has continued, in part through the Church Planting Council, USMB has not experienced the exponential growth dreamed of in the Future Story.
Creating momentum
Today, Box has an opportunity to re-evaluate and focus a national church planting vision. He says the local church is key.
“USMB as an organization is only going to be as effective in (church planting) as our local churches are passionate about it,” he says. “It really has to be driven by the local church. I’ll do everything I can in my role to resource it.”
When it comes to church planting, Box prefers to talk about church multiplication.
While not every church will plant another independent congregation, every church can be involved in the multiplication effort, Box says. This can include engaging people who don’t yet know Jesus, sending someone to the mission field, adding a second worship service or planting a campus. The term also encompasses immigrant congregations added to the national faith community.
“I think if we are grabbing onto that church multiplication mindset with both hands and holding tightly, inevitably it leads to planting churches because it changes an ethos and a DNA of a church,” Box says.
Box gathered veteran church planters and other stakeholders in February to identify needs pertaining to church multiplication, including coaching, project management, support and resources in all languages spoken in USMB churches. The goal is for plants to be local church driven and contextualized to the location.
“I think one of the questions is, ‘How do you both have a unified effort but also have enough diversity in the way you’re doing things that it meets the needs of all the folks?’” Box says, referencing the work at the district level among Congolese, Ethiopian and Spanish-speaking congregations.
“There’s some really good work happening that we probably need to do a better job of recognizing,” Box says. “It doesn’t take away from the challenges—we have to get some momentum again—but I do think that’s important to note. Church planting has always been changing, in a sense, as far as models and approaches. But the more we become demographically diverse in the U.S., I think we need a broader picture of what it means to plant churches.”
In the short term, Box hopes to focus on getting a few projects off the ground to create momentum.
“I don’t think funding is an issue for us,” he says. “We have a number of people not only who are already giving but who are waiting in the wings (saying), ‘Show me a project that I can invest in.’
“I’m hopeful because we have expertise, we have people with passion (and) we have resources. The challenge is to get to a place that we have the people and the vision and the projects.”
Janae Rempel Shafer is the Christian Leader associate editor. She joined the CL staff in September 2017 with six years of experience as a professional journalist. Shafer is an award-winning writer, having received three 2016 Kansas Press Association Awards of Excellence and an Evangelical Press Association Higher Goals award in 2022. Shafer graduated from Tabor College in 2010 with a bachelor of arts in Communications/Journalism and Biblical/Religious Studies. She and her husband, Austin, attend Ridgepoint Church in Wichita, Kansas.
