What Is the Church Planting Movement?

David Garrison defnes the Church Planting Movement as “rapidly multiplying indigenous churches planting churches that sweep across a people group or population segment […]” Garrison argues that the key to the Church Planting Movement is that it occurs at high and recurring rates, with a known and identical pattern of action, accelerating the local growth rate and aiming to reach the maximum number of people in the community. The second signifcant part is replicating the founding of churches from the home camp to increase the number of believers, which is why churches set goals to add more churches in the same city, district, or state in which they operate. Finally, there are additional parameters, such as the internal duplication of congregation members who set out to establish new churches in the same community and the possibility that these churches will be able to convey the message, thus changing the lives of devotees.

Jonathan Edwards puts his fnger down on Falwell's 1971 speech, called “The Church at Antioch,” which was spoken before a group of fundamentalist church leaders, as the speech that advocated for the church planting methodology. In this speech, Falwell distinguished between two types of churches. On the one hand, ethereal, transparent, universal and intangible churches attempted to conquer the entire world but lacked any members. He referred to them as universal churches, belonging to the national umbrella organization of churches that dealt with universal issues.