10 Years into planting a church

Restore Church just celebrated 10 years of ministry. We’ve learned a lot in our first decade. We made a lot of mistakes. God gave us a special favor in what I would describe as rocky soil in an urban, declining population center. My goal is to share a bit of insight from lessons we learned. I’ll focus on each phase we grew through leading up to our current moment. Hopefully this will encourage you as well as help you discern your season in church planting. This isn't theory. This is everything we’ve learned the hard way growing from 9 adults to a church of 400 on 2 acres in downtown Portsmouth. God can do an awful lot when willing people spend plenty of time in difficult places.

Idea Phase

Once you’ve been bitten by the church planting bug you can’t shake it. I (Marc) never intended to plant. My goal in life was to be a plumber who was faithful to his church. I grew up in a great church that I loved. I have never church hopped or shopped. My papaw pastored my home church where I grew up. When papaw retired Karl became my pastor. I loved Karl, the staff and the christian school attached to my home church. Were I not in ministry I’d still be a member there. However, when I was 16 God called me to preach. I went to Bible college at my local church. When I graduated I really wanted to stay there and maybe get a job on staff, but there weren’t any openings. So I went with one of the pastors to start a church 20 minutes down the road as an associate planter/pastor at 22 years of age.

This was what I needed to do and see. I was forced to raise money and create a network of supporters at a young age. Our home church encouraged people to go with us so we had a starting launch team of about 30. We did some outreach and launched with more than 100 people on the first Sunday. When I saw how things worked to start a church I was very surprised. To that point I assumed church planting was this impossible task that is only for guys who couldn’t make it as a pastor. Within 2 years the church bought a building and grew to about 150. By year 6 it was established enough to support itself and no longer required outside funding. This was all between 2008-2014. These were still early days of the systems, strategies and principles we have available today. David is still pastoring there 18 years later. He and I talk about how much we wish we had those resources in 2007 that today are taken for granted. At age 24 I had seen enough. Planting a church was no longer some intimidating idea. It seemed very approachable and even necessary for me to pursue. I felt responsible for what I knew could be done and the experience I’d been allowed to receive.

The problem became looking at a map. I knew what to do and felt pretty confident about how to do it, but where? The sending agency would likely approve me to go anywhere I asked to go. The Lord never gave me a city or even a state. I considered California, Washington DC and a few places I’d like to plant. Nothing. Years ago a professor told me when you don’t know where to go or what to do just pick a spot and get to work. “Don’t lose sight of the mission because you’re waiting for the perfect location.” I am a 757 native. I never wanted to leave. So I decided to stay. I focused on the center of Hampton Roads. Prayed. Committed. Got to work.

Some of you are much more spiritual. You have a vision, call or confirmation. I didn’t. Years later I realized that God gave me a heart for Hampton Roads as our bus returned from youth camp going into the downtown tunnel at age 18. I stood up on the bus and pointed 50 teenagers eyes out the window and said “God has called us to reach this city!” Turns out that spot on the interstate is about half a mile from where we started the church in Portsmouth. It’s great confirmation, but I’d forgotten all about that when it was time to choose a location. We just focused on downtown bc it was the center. It’s also low income and high crime. It’s a less than ideal place to launch a church. More on that later.

During the idea phase you have to wrestle with if this is even realistic for you. Is God calling you? Are you equipped or just excited? Are you able or just burnt out where you are? Does it have to be right now or can it wait? Could you plant where you are or do you need to move?

the case for planting close

By now you realize I live where I’m from. Hampton Roads has nearly 2M people so I’ve never felt like I needed to move away to reach people. As a matter off act people move here every year thanks to all the military bases. Additionally, I am a local’s local. This region has been historically difficult for southerners who assume it’s the south and northerners who assume it’s just like Maryland. My point is you may be gifted and qualified to reach people where you are now.

Additionally, parachute planting (moving into an area you know nobody) is the hardest way to plant. Yes, God can do it. Yes, there are success stories. In our movement (and most others) the healthiest plants are launched out of healthy churches 15-30 minutes down the road. Why? Because there is buy in, cultural readiness, resourcing and so munch more. If you’re not sure where to plant, I’d strongly encourage you to consider where you are or close by. I had a local network of friends, coworkers (I worked at Fedex part time), and family. I can’t imagine not utilizing that first. I am conservative by nature. You may be more of a risk taker. Personally, I want as many advantages as possible before I enter any endeavor.

Pre-Launch Phase

Post-launch was very hard to navigate for me. I’m not very pastoral by nature. I’m more motivational and focused on action. As a result I feel like I was uniquely gifted for the pre-launch phase. None of what I’m going to share here is original to me. Every plan, timeline, strategy and system was already in existence. I just spent 14 months finding it, implementing it and building the launch team. Pre-launch was the hardest season for me emotionally, but action-plan and next steps seemed almost natural. Let’s walk through it. You need to do all these things simultaneously.

Raise more money than you think you need.

It’s expensive to plant a church in an urban center. Sure, you can plant cheaper by starting a home church. That’s not my experience or background. I was raised inna healthy church of ~800 people. That’s the size that I am familiar with and aiming toward. We can talk about size dynamics later. Suffice it to say if you hope to start a church that sustains itself within 5-6 years, you’ll need to raise quit a bit of money on the front side. We raised 2.5x the recommended amount because we knew we’d invest in taking leaders to training conferences, a huge marketing campaign for launch, quality portable sound equipment, etc. On top of that your outside giving will begin to decrease within 6 months of launch. This will cost more than you think.

The inevitable temptation looks like this. You start raising money. You convince yourself you just need to get to starting the church. That’s a foolish idea. Don’t listen to it. Keep raising money. Invest in this season of waiting. Stop rushing. Keep raising money and partnerships. You’ll need more financial backing than you assume. This season is an opportunity for you to learn and grow before you get bogged down planting and pastoring. Here’s how I grew while I was raising money.

Attend more conferences than ever.

This is the most free time you will have so schedule some conferences and training. You should want to know what you don’t know. Learning from people ahead of you is invaluable at this stage. I recommend conferences like ARC, Exponential, and Acts 29. Are there weird teachings and personalities in those groups? Yes! Grow up and learn to eat the meat and spit out the bones. The training you’ll find at those conferences and workshops is better than anything you or I could com up with on our own in a dozen lifetimes.

Someone else has figured this out already. Why not learn from them?

At these conferences I met planters who were ahead of me by months and some by years. Getting their feedback was invaluable. I still follow some of them online a decade later. Going to the breakouts allowed me to ask follow up questions to seasoned planters. I got numbers from people who could help me and coach me.

Interview leaders who have done this recently.

During this season I made sure when I was in a region where someone had recently launched large to reach out to them. I wanted to pick their brain. I still have all the notes from each of those meetings. I read through them every few years for any insight or advice I was too young to receive at that time. I sat down with pastors and planters who had planted within the last decade. I told them where we were, what the plan was and invited them to shoot holes through my ideas. This was formative for me. In the last few years young men have done the same with me. Within a few moments I can typically discern how teachable they are. Guys who wont listen to people who’ve already done what they are attempting are always in for a long ride. Lesson there. Be teachable. Know you don’t know what you don’t know. Find someone who can help you see some flaws in your model, approach or timeline. Do not interview someone who planted 30 years ago. The church planting landscape is constantly changing. Today there are challenges and opportunities that are unique to this season. You want someone who has navigated planting a church more recently.

Get a coach who will hold you accountable

This is one area that I struggled. I had numerous mentors, but not one designated coach who could hold my feet to the fire. I needed that more than anything post-launch. Pre-launch I could follow the plan and make things happen. Post-launch I felt overwhelmed at what to do next, leadership development, staff issues etc. Today I would go through ARC training and use an ARC coach. I’m not a fan of everything ARC does but their training and coaches are among the best.

Build a launch team that can handle the launch you’re praying for.

Whatever number you have at launch will largely dictate your attendance moving forward. Typically you average half of your launch Sunday attendance that first year. So if you launch with 100, you likely will average 50 for the first year. This is because well wishers leave after the first Sunday. Some come to kick the tires and realize this isn’t for them. Your church plant will likely bare out those numbers. We can argue about church size all day, but in todays economy a new church is very difficult to sustain itself financially with less than 100 people. An existing church can because the building is paid off and there are years of savings from the past in the bank. A new church is too lean to make it below 100 often.

All that to say, the larger you launch the more likely you are large enough to be healthy 5 years in. Yes, you can launch large and be spiritually unhealthy. Right now I’m assuming you are healthy emotionally and spiritually. Too often we send out guys to plant churches who are spiritually and emotionally well, but have no idea how to make this work financially. As a result we have a graveyard of would have been churches and jaded former church planters. Your goal should be to launch large, but you cant launch large without building a team…

Remember this ratio-1:5. You need 1 serve team member for every 5 people you hope to welcome to your launch Sunday. So, if you hope to launch with 250 on launch Sunday you need 50 launch team members. Why? Because if 250 people show up and you only have 20 launch team members they will be overwhelmed. You wont have enough people to host, run a nursery, kids ministry, usher etc. On the flip side if you have 50 people on the launch team and only 75 people show up, it will feel disappointing because you had potential to reach more guests. You only get one launch. It’s a real opportunity if done well.

How do you build a launch team? That’s a separate document, but basically you do the emotionally difficult work of putting yourself out there with people and inviting them to join you on a wild journey. You have to be honest, cast vision, protect the vision, identify leaders, fight discouragement daily and somehow piece together a strong launch. There’s not enough room here, but basically this is the hard part. The more work you do on the front end of launch the more fruit you will reap on the backside of your launch. YOU ONLY GET ONE LAUNCH! Don’t waste it. Don’t rush it. When we built our launch team they were invited to biweekly gatherings where I cast vision. They knew the timeline. They signed a launch team member covenant. It outlines 5 core commitments.

As a launch team member of Restore Church, I am committed to:

1 Serve: I will be on a serve team at this church both before and after launch

2 Give: I will support this church plant financially

3 Pray: I will pray daily for this endeavor

4 Invite: I will invite people to our launch team gatherings and/or to meet with Pastor Marc

5 Self-feed: I will grow in maturity in this season by committing to the Word and prayer as we enter a phase of unknown

Our launch team grew to more than 50. That was key because we had 264 on launch Sunday. A healthy launch team ration is ~ 1:5. You need 50 people in serve team roles to pull off a decent Sunday service for 250 people. If 500 show up and your launch team is only 50 it’s going to be a difficult day. Your kids environments will be understaffed. Your welcome team will struggle to welcome all the guests. The list goes on. If you hope to launch with 500 on opening Sunday you need a launch team of 100. That takes a long time to build. We built our team from 9-50 and it took 9 months. We held launch team gatherings, public free cookouts, block parties, outreach events and more. We had visitors at every launch team gathering. Not everyone joined. That’s a good sign. This should clearly not be for everyone.

Focus all your energy toward Launch Sunday

Every time we met we talked about Launch Sunday in 2016. Once the date was set we began to pray over 1.31.16. We passed out 10,000s of thousands of flyers across town. We did two separate 30,000 piece mailers. We put yard signs all over town. Everything had a big “1.31.16 LAUNCH SUNDAY” and a website attached.

Whatever happens on Launch Sunday determines your first year. We had 264 on Launch Sunday. We averages 130 in 2016. That’s the magic formula. Whatever you launch with expect half of that for the first year.

Be careful to make Launch Sunday good, but not ideal. Play 3 songs. preach a good message, but don’t set people up for disappointment next week when half the band was borrowed and that message wasn’t your typical delivery. Focus on quality. You’d rather have a 3 piece quality instrumental team lead worship that can’t play together well.

Post-Launch Phase

After Launch Sunday the reality sets in

Sunday 01.31.16 was unseasonably warm. I remember walking our dogs after the service in downtown and telling Casie, “well we have a church now, time to pastor and lead it well. No going back!” I didn’t know how hard it would be. Honestly post launch was harder for me than pre-launch. Pre-launch exhausted me emotionally because I’m not a natural extrovert. Meeting so many new people and inviting them onto this mission was hard on me. However leading the church week in and week out was a new trial. Hiring and leading staff was brand new territory. Raising up small group leaders and developing ministry leaders was brand new.

A few months after launch we went to our first ARC conference. It had so much we were looking for. Documents for onboarding, pathways for development and so much more we weren’t ready to implement. We started working the bite size chunks into our church. Pastor Kevin helped with leaders of teams. I focused on group leaders for a few years before he handled that as well. It was all so exhausting. I struggled. To top it off we were told right after launch that our venue was closing so we had about a year to find somewhere else to meet. We were renting the largest venue in town. There was nowhere else to handle a church of 100+ with 3 kids ministry environments. It was stressful. God provided.

Moving is almost like a Launch Sunday

We bought a warehouse less than a mile from our meeting location. Converted it to a church. Moved in 2 years after launching in downtown. It was the closest thing we had to a second launch. We called it Grand Opening Sunday. We sent out two 35,000 piece mailers. Yard signs. You know the story by now. On our first Sunday in the new space we had 357 people. A few weeks later we had 407 at Easter. In between we stayed above 200. I remember Pastor Kevin telling me 3 weeks after Grand Opening Sunday that we were still above 200. My feet left the ground. I knew we’d broken through the 200 mark (a difficult hurdle for churches) and were on pace to stay above it. Praise God we did too.

Staffing becomes key beyond 200

For the next 2 years we hit a ceiling of ~ 240. We knew it was staffing. We attempted to hire more staff. We made some errors in hiring. We hired guys who could sing, but turns out their references weren’t exactly honest. We have some stories, everyone does. Dealing with staff took years to understand.

We did learn the best strategy is hiring from within usually. Our kids leader is still on staff today 7 years laster. So is our administrator who we hired in 2017. We have 8 on staff at the moment and 5 were developed from within. We developed an internship program to develop potential hires. We were plugging along making disciples. Anyway 2020 came along and 2020’d on us.

Post-Covid Reality

I enjoyed Covid. As an introvert it was a nice break for me to be myself. I lost weight, spent time outside, and enjoyed the change. Additionally my wife and I found out we were expecting a miracle child. Our church suspended in-person services for months. It was June before we met in-person again outdoors. By the fall we had tent services. It was a long process regathering everyone. We made plenty of mistakes. It was mid 2022 before we fully recovered to our pre-covid attendance numbers. Like many churches we were surprised that giving climbed throughout 2020-2022. This helped us stay encouraged when attendance took longer than expected to materialize. During this phase we developed resilience and character. It was now clear how committed many on our staff were to the mission. These were people who’d just stayed with us through a hard season.

Growth Seasons

In 2023 we experienced a sudden bump in attendance. Over the course of about 6 months the church grew by 50% from 200 to 300+ seemingly for no reason at all. At a retreat a year prior I was lamenting to Greg Surratt that our church wasn’t growing. We’d been stuck around 200. He asked for specifics. He brushed my worries aside. “You’re growing slowly year over year. Your church grew from 2016-2020. I wouldn’t worry until you went 5-7 years with no movement. Growth comes in spurts and starts.” Sure enough that’s been true. He and other mentors have encouraged us to keep focusing on the boring details that matter week in and week out. Feed people from the Word. Make sure discipleship pathways are clear. Welcome people into the church. Hire staff as you grow. Stop overthinking everything. Too many pastors get bored and start new initiatives or ministries before they’ve dialed in the basics. Trust the Lord. Be patient. Watch as faithfulness in many

Dealing with difficult people

As we’ve grown I’ve found my role and my voice as a leader. My gift is preaching, teaching and leading. Sometimes leading means I have to address sin, division, and critics. Confronting people used to scare me. Today it doesn’t. Most people have never been confronted well. I do my best to lovingly but firmly confront issues and people. Over the last few years more people have left upset and critical. Some have lobbed accusations my way. Things that at one time would have wrecked me. God has given me thick skin and convictions deep enough to smile through a lot of it.

Most of leading well comes down to becoming an immovable object on gospel clarity, truth and holiness. Wolves will find out you will confront false teaching. Manipulative people who try to sway staff against you will discover you’ve already warned staff about joining divisions and fragmenting the body over nonsense. Once you realize that you can’t be everyones friend it all becomes a lot easier.

Raising sons and daughters of the house

I grew up in a big church that pressured us to pursue God’s will. The underlying assumption was always that God would lead you out. He never led you to stay. After all there’s a great big world out there to reach. I applaud the evangelistic focus, but question the wisdom of sending all our sons and daughters out. On the other side of town another church was keeping many of their sons and daughters and training them for ministry to stay. They planted church campuses, started new ministries, built the body. Today that’s the language I use with our teenagers and young adults. We are equipping them to stay unless the Lord leads them out. Who better to reach this area than people who know the area? This is why I never moved away from the 757. I’m a locals local.

Last year we started an apprenticeship program for our High School seniors. We pay them to be on campus 2 days per week. They have responsibilities. They’re spending time with staff and leaders. We take them to conferences. We believe they are forming leadership roots right here. They love their church. They grew up here. These are the type of young men and women we want to hire as the church grows. When churches equip their sons and daughters to lead they find able and ready staff that will serve faithfully and sacrificially.

Staff rhythms and schedules

We run most of our week on a Monday-Wednesday schedule. Thursdays are remote. Fridays and Saturdays are for family. I personally need Thursdays to myself to study and prepare for Sunday. When I’m in the office I rarely accomplish much of value. I don’t have an office. Nobody does. Our building forces many of us to share conference rooms. Occasionally it’s quiet enough for me to read or study. Often I’m fielding questions, leading a standing meeting, or conversing with members (many volunteers come in during office hours to fellowship and just rest at church). Thanks to a great staff not much falls on my shoulders as a must complete outside of sermons and meetings. This frees me up to pray, walk, plan, and dream.

I hired my current coach in 2022. One of his big agenda items was helping us hire out the big 5 to break 400 in attendance. His advice (and many others) is to order your hires like this:

1. Worship Leader- the Sunday services need to be good enough for people to invite their friends. Not perfection, execution.

2. Kids Leader- Parents need to know their children are in a fun, safe learning environment. Someone needs to own this entire ministry responsibility.

3. Youth Pastor- Once a children’s ministry is established you can focus on middle and high school students.

4. Adult Pastor- This leader will own the discipleship process as well as overseeing adult ministries like small groups, serve teams and outreach.

5. Administrator- You need someone who handles the books, the details, communication and everything else in the church office.

Most churches get this out of order and it frustrates their growth and their time management. Once these 5 role are hired (even if some are part time) you can begin to focus primarily on leading and preaching. This is pretty much where we are in 2026. We will add more as we learn more.