Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus
I’m going to describe a Type Of Guy starting a business, and you’re going to guess the business:
The founder is very young, often under 25.
He might work alone or with a founding team, but when he tells the story of the founding it will always have him at the center.
He has no credentials for this business.
This business has a grand vision, which he thinks is the most important thing in the world.
This business lives and dies by its growth metrics.
90% of attempts in this business fail, but he would never consider that those odds apply to him
He funds this business via a mix of small contributors, large networks pooling their funds, and major investors.
Disagreements between founders are one of the largest contributors to failure.
Funders invest for a mix of truly caring about the business’s goal, and wanting to receive the glamor of the work without the risk.
Starts a podcast advising others even as he’s failing himself.
Would rather start from scratch than reform an existing institution.
Oversight is minimal and exerted mostly through funding.
Generally unconcerned with negative externalities
Always uses the latest technology to get ahead
Both funding and the job itself heavily reward charisma and narcissism.
Hint for those outside the Bay Area and Twitter: at this point you’re supposed to guess “tech start-up”
Marries before he starts his business, and often has young children.
Growth metrics are the end in and of themselves, not a proxy for money.
Hint for those outside the Bay Area and twitter: this is obviously not a tech start-up.
This guy is founding an evangelical church, and I find his ecosystem fascinating. First for its stunning similarities to venture-capital-funded tech start-ups, and then for its simplicity and open-heartedness. None of the dynamics in church planting are unique or even particularly rare, but they are unobfuscated, and that makes church planting the equivalent of a large print book for the social dynamics that favor charismatic narcissists.
My qualifications to speak on church planting are having spent six weeks listening to podcasts by and for church planters, plus a smattering of reading. I expect this is about as informative as listening to venture podcasts is to actual venture capital, which is to say it’s a great way to get a sense of how small players want to be perceived, but so-so at communicating all of what is actually happening. Religion-wise, I also raised in a mainline Protestant denomination, although I left as a teenager. My qualifications to speak on tech start-ups are living in the Bay Area and being on Twitter.*
[*I’ve also been an employee at two start-ups, have angel investor friends, and some of my favorite clients are founders looking for their next thing. But I assure you, going to parties in the bay is sufficient.]
What is Church Planting?
Evangelical Christians are in a bind: they believe that introducing heathens to Jesus is the most important thing they can possibly do, but are fundamentally opposed to the kind of structure that Catholics and mainline Protestant denominations use to support missionaries. Missionaries have a hierarchy they answer to, and one of the things I’ve come to respect about evangelicals is how little use they have for hierarchies and credentials.
How do you spread the Word when you can’t order someone to do it? You decentralize. Church planting is a do-acracy, where young men decide that God has called them to lead a church, and a decentralized network of financiers fund whoever they choose. This man, and perhaps an assisting team, builds a church from the ground up, answering to no one but his funders.
The Planters
We’ve already covered many traits of a planter, but let me give a few more:
If under 30, he spontaneously came to the belief that God called him to plant a church.
A much smaller number of 30- and 40-somethings are pushed into church planting by their pastor.
He does not have a seminary degree but if he was Saved by high school he probably went to a bible college (which may or may not be accredited by a secular assessor). Evangelicals do not have much use for credentials.
He has probably trained as a youth pastor at an existing church, but it’s also possible he was an assistant pastor or is starting cold.
He does not consider himself affiliated with any denomination, although in practice there are common theological strains among the “non-denominationals.” If you ask a church planter for his beliefs he will say “I teach the bible.”
He may hold a traditional job as well as pastoring, especially early in the process.
Why do I say that church planters tend towards charismatic narcissism?
First, charisma is a bona fide requirement for being a pastor, especially an evangelical pastor who needs to recruit a new flock. This is doubly true for “parachute plants,” in which a planter moves to a new-to-them area and starts a church, knowing no one beyond their support team. Funders would be stupid not to select for the ability to make people like you and support your goals, and if they somehow were that stupid, the uncharismatic ones would lose in the marketplace (another way in which planting culture embodies American virtues: their embrace of creative destruction). Similarly, VCs like founders who are the subject of positive pieces in trade journals, not because they think those articles have any factual content, but because the skills to get those articles written about oneself have other uses.
Second, planters are selected for a lack of self-doubt. It takes a special kind of 24-year-old to think, “Hundreds of people should pay me for my advice on the most important topic in existence every week,” and those who do will trend towards narcissism.
Third, the job is more rewarding and less taxing for narcissists (and extroverts). Lead pastor is an incredibly social job, requiring numerous 1:1 interactions and performing in front of a hopefully large group.
When I first started this investigation, I expected this push towards charisma and narcissism to be countered by the demand that church planters have strong moral character. Surely planters were selected by wise elders, who’d known them for years and seen them be noble under difficult circumstances. And many places do at least pay lip service to that ideal. But the very first checklist I found for assessing church planters had a noticeable absence of demand for even self-assessed character, much less an appraiser with deep knowledge of the potential founder. 80% of the questions focused on ability to conceive a grand vision and get people to go along with it.
This deeply violates my sense of what organized religion should be, and my lack of participation in organized religion in no way lessens my feelings of entitlement to see it done the way I want. But the fact that anyone can be a pastor is another facet of evangelicalism that accords with the virtues of America. No one can tell you you can’t found a Bible-teaching church. They can decline to fund you or attend, or if they really hate you perhaps write some mean things in a newsletter. But if one funder declines, you can always try another, and another. You just have to believe in your grand vision hard enough (which will select for narcissists).
The Goals
The goal of a church planter (and their funders) is to introduce more people to Jesus. I use the word “introduce” quite literally here; it’s much more like trying to introduce two friends at a party and get them to shake hands than trying to get a friend to read a life-changing book, or introducing them to the ineffable presence of my childhood church. This is one of the biggest differences between evangelical and mainline Protestants- they both talk about both Jesus and God, but for evangelicals the emphasis is on the former, and for mainlines the latter.
Church planters take their goal of Jesus handshakes very, very seriously, considering it the most important biblical commandment. This makes a ton of sense if you accept their belief that the handshake is the difference between eternity in hell and eternity in heaven. Given the importance of saving souls, merely founding and growing a church isn’t enough; You need to grow large and plant churches that themselves grow large and plant more churches. You need to be disciplemaxxing at all times. Leaderboards track the churches that are the largest and fastest-growing (baptisms is another area of competition, although I didn’t find a leaderboard for it).
This philosophy bugged me a lot because why is a handshake (or as they would put it, knowing Jesus Christ and accepting him as your savior) sufficient? How do you know someone really accepted Christ and isn’t just saying it? What if they do it wrong? Protestants don’t believe in salvation through works, so you can’t even use their behavior as a check. And what if a bad Christian nonetheless recruits more people to the Jesus party? Their recruits will never even have a chance at doing it right.
An ex-evangelical friend explained the reasoning as follows: as long as someone is coming to the party and shaking hands with Jesus, there’s a chance for them to get a handshake firm enough to accept him into their heart. But if they’re not even attempting to live as a Christian, Jesus can’t make inroads. The role of a pastor is to enable Jesus to take as many shots on goal as possible. Which again, makes sense once you accept their premises.
The Funders
Lots of charismatic narcissists and young idiots have grand visions for themselves, but only certain ecosystems systematically support those dreams. If we want to understand church planting and environments like it, we need to look at the people who are actually making it happen, i.e., the funders.
We’re talking about nondenominational churches, which leaves four sources of funding:
Existing megachurches that devote a portion of their budget to funding church planting. These are the Saudis of the church planting world. They often require the planted church to tithe back to them.
Sending networks, which pool money from many churches to support planters. These are equivalent to VC firms or investment syndicates. They also often require planted churches to tithe back (same source)
E.g. Acts29, Send Network, Grace Global Network, Grace Church Network, Grace Network (Canada).
A friends-and-family round, where people you know donate significantly.
The Patreon model, where hundreds of people or churches give small amounts.
Like venture capital, funding from 1+2 is often pledged and released in stages based on meeting milestones. Milestones might be acquiring a new space, attendance, or finding additional funders. They will often have some ideological requirements, like complementarianism (men and women are spiritually equal but called to different roles) or cessationism (the belief that the Holy Spirit no longer enables humans to do miracles).
Churches and sending networks will often provide other support along with their funding, more like incubators than traditional VC. This can include classes, apprenticeships, support groups, and the same for the wife you definitely already have (being a planter’s wife sounds like all of the downside with none of the upside, more on this later).
Funding can be anything from six months of partial expenses to fully covering four years of expenses- but very rarely go beyond four years. At four years you are expected to be self-sufficient and ideally have started nurturing your daughter church plants (which every planter lists as their goal), because if you don’t do it by year five you never will.
Much like venture capital, church planting is a hits-based business. Funders expect most of their plants to fail, and of those that succeed, they expect most successes to be modest. You make your investment back on the 1 in 100 founding that becomes a unicorn (or mega church). However success rates vary by funder; one church claimed 14/14 successes for their high-touch spawning process, and people on the patreon model are most likely to fail.
The Human Cost
The worst case scenario for a church plant is something like Mars Hill Church, where a pastor built a successful megachurch with a tightknit community, only to abuse his authority and destroy the church*. At best, this cost members their spiritual home and a community they had come to count on. At worst, they were so badly traumatized they could no longer have a relationship with God. This doesn’t seem that surprising when you’re led by a 25 year old who (untruthfully) brags that he went from heathen to intended pastor with no stops inbetween.
[*Mars Hill was funded via a friends and family round but received substantial advice and encouragement from the Acts29 network, so I think it’s fair to use it to assess the judgement of the decentralized leadership]
Similarly, I hate how little Silicon Valley pays attention to externalities. I don’t mean the creative destruction via things like Waymo replacing drivers, I mean advice like “advertise two features and implement the one that more people click on,” or “build your fintech business on sex workers and then kick them out once you’re big enough.” Users’ time and energy are treated as free goods. The benefits to users might sometimes outweigh the costs, but I never get the sense anyone is doing that math.
The Life Cycle
Once a man has decided to plant a church, a common starting point is hosting a bible study in his home, but some plants skip this step and go straight to Sunday services. The first step to holding Sunday Services is to find a location. My sense is that if you get a bunch of early-stage pastors together, this is what they complain about. You want somewhere that’s available at prime church time, has seating and A/C, feels like a church, and costs little. The dream is finding a 7th Day Adventist church (who hold their services on Saturday). Movie theaters are not common but pastors who use them seem happier than those in school gyms and hotel conference centers, because it spares them two hours setting up speakers and folding chairs.
The standard advice is to start with “preview services” to draw some interest locally and work out the bugs. Then you do an official launch service that will draw lots of people, mostly existing Christians and your supportive friends. You’re considered successful if your regular attendance reaches half of your launch attendance.
As your church grows you need additional rooms for nursery and Sunday School. If your existing space doesn’t have convenient small rooms, you’ll need to move. In fact you’ll often have to do this anyway as you gain followers. Churches go through several moves as they grow, hermit-crab style.
Unless you started with a too-big space, you will probably hermit crab your way through larger and larger gymnasiums until a nearby church fails, at which point you merge with them or buy their building. Buying the building is preferable; mergers saddle you with a bunch of people who aren’t bought into your cult of personality. The most successful churches will go on to build their own giant buildings.
Two hundred regular attendees is a big milestone for planted churches. I first heard it mentioned merely as a size few churches get past, but it’s also a financial threshold. At 200 people, the variation evens out so you can have a longer planning horizon, and probably afford a backup pastor.
Every church planter at least pays lip service to the goal of planting more churches. That requires rapid buildup. I’ve varyingly heard that if you don’t support a new church plant in the first 5, 3, or 1.5 years, you never will.
Past 200 attendees I know less, because there aren’t that many megachurch planters going on these podcasts. However, you do eventually achieve the biggest crab shell possible, or just put down enough roots that you can’t transition again. If you attract any more people after that you start streaming your sermons to other rooms on the same property. Eventually (2,000 people?), you begin streaming to off-site locations, which is known as being a multi-site church (more recently, you’ll also start streaming online).
Multisite churches are something of a micro-denomination, where an existing church will create a new physical location that is still considered part of the original church, with the same lead pastor. Generally most of its sermons are piped in from the original church (Evangelicals are on the forefront of using new tech in service of God). It will have at least one site-lead pastor. Initially, I assumed this pastor did the work of local ministering- couples counseling, running food banks, etc. But these things aren’t emphasized much at evangelical churches, so I’m not quite sure what fills their days.
A minority of pastors are too entrepreneurial and will leave their settled church to plant a new one, but it seems far more common for the founders to stay on indefinitely.
The Theology
You’ll notice I didn’t mention theology beyond recruitment, or what people do after shaking Jesus’s hand. That’s because independent pastors and even many denominations rarely discuss this. The dominant attitude (going back to at least the 1850s) is that they don’t want to let petty disagreements about the nature of God and the Church disrupt the vital business of throwing parties where people can meet Jesus.
The passphrase for this is “I teach the Bible.” That sounds neutral but since everyone has a frame and everyone injects that frame into their teaching, what it actually means is “My interpretation of the Bible is so obvious it hasn’t occurred to me people could draw other conclusions” This annoys everyone (exact episode lost) who both teaches from the Bible and recognizes that neutrality is not a human possibility. But it successfully functions as a passphrase for people who have agreed they’re on the same team.
The Failures
This section is weaker because failed planters rarely go on podcasts. That said…
The goal of church planters is to bring people to Jesus. As a whole, evangelicalism is not growing faster than the population, so seems like the system is failing by their lights.
Individual planters have a failure rate of somewhere between 30% and 90%, depending on their support levels and how you define “attempt”- right in the range of tech start-ups.
For systemic data on why churches fail I rely heavily on this survey by Dan Steel of struggling (not necessarily failed) church plants. The top issues he found:
“No-one is fully rounded when it comes to gifting” aka “skill issue” (75%)
“Not getting what we want”, which seems to be either skill issues in disguise (insufficient attendance) or external shocks like pastoral illness or suddenly losing a location (65%).
“Disunity when you’re fragile is costly”, which is any conflict between the pastor and other people. This got a boost from covid-19, where fights about meetings and masks were common and costly (63%).
Pastor character issues, which they define as getting the job done at the expense of other people (45%).
“Naiveté and over-optimism regarding the speed of growth”, which is a mix of skill issues and bad expectation setting (23%).
A guest on New Churches Podcast gives the following reasons, in unquantified order of importance:
Pastor isolation, which I think is code for discouragement or running out of money. I don’t get the sense planters are leaving thriving churches because they feel isolated; when successful planters feel bad it’s called burnout.
Conflict between the founding team. This surprised me because it very rarely comes up in interviews. From what I’d heard, founding teams aren’t important enough for conflict with them to matter. So either I’m listening to a subset of people without this problem, or they’re hiding it.
Skill issues and a lack of self-awareness around skill issues.
I didn’t bother looking up numbers for why start-ups fail but from party chatter the list is pretty similar.
The Alternatives
Starting a church is a lot of work; why not just take over an existing one? The official reason is that God called them to, and that new churches are the best way to introduce more people to Jesus, which is the most important act of worship. But I can’t help but notice that for a certain personality type, planting your own church seems way more fun than stepping into an existing one, for the same reason he’d have more fun founding a start-up than being a middle manager at IBM.
When you found a church (or a company), you’re baked into it. Everyone who attends (works for) your church is there because they like you. That’s a great feeling (especially if you’re a narcissist). It also saves you a whole lot of problems with parishioners who remember how their last pastor organized Sunday School and will fight any change tooth and nail. If you join an existing church and it closes, you broke something that worked. If your church plant closes, well, planting is risky, and at least you were willing to try (a pastor’s second planting attempt is much scarier, because now if you fail it’s a pattern).
Starting a new church is more work, of course, but lots of people would rather put the work in if they can be their own boss.
The Attendees
Thus far, I’ve found church planting admirably consistent in its efforts to reach its stated goal (recruit people who are not in contact with Jesus and get them to shake his hand, thus saving them from eternal damnation). We’ve already looked at how the system as a whole is not growing, but there’s a subtler issue in who they aim at.
The closer someone is to death, the closer they are to eternal damnation. So you’d think that if saving souls was your goal, you’d focus on saving the elderly. As a bonus, the old-but-not-decrepit have more money and more hours to volunteer. However, planters seem almost sneering at the elderly, calling them “white hairs” and “bald heads” who are more trouble than they’re worth. In practice, attendees tend to be within 10 years of the age of the pastor, so if a 25-year-old found your plant, it won’t attract 65-year-olds for 30 years. The sense I get is that churches and funders go after young families because they are sexy, the same way that the start-up ecosystem didn’t discover parents as a market until 10 years ago.
Speaking of sexy: the sexiest recruits are those new to Jesus, or at least prodigal sons. If you listen to church planters talk, these people make up the majority of attendees. But given the population numbers, we know that attendance is not growing faster than the population and have a higher-than-average fertility rate, they are net losing people. They could be shedding lots of people and then recruiting some back, but based on some survey data, it seems like they’re mostly not.*
I ultimately guess that 10-40% of attendees could in some sense be considered new recruits. My sources:
This unsourced slideshow says that the previously unchurched make up only 10-15% of attendees at newly planted churches in Canada.
A survey of white American Evangelicals say that 18% were previously unaffiliated, and 4% came from non-Christian-Evangelical backgrounds.
Pew estimates that 40% of evangelicals were not raised Christian. This group includes members of non-Christian churches, but I think does not include people who were raised Christian, walked away, and returned (who church plants would recognize as a win).
It’s good for pastors that most of their flock is already on board with Jesus, because it means they’re also on board with tithing. Conventional wisdom is that it takes 4 years for the previously unchurched to contribute financially. Given that only the most generous funders supply 4 years of expenses, and some only a few months, it is absolutely imperative for pastors to attract people with an existing tithing habit.
If a new member was already Christian, your hope is that they’re new to the city as well. “Stolen sheep,” aka people who moved to your church because they were dissatisfied with their last one, are considered a mixed blessing. They will tithe and probably volunteer, but it’s unlikely they will be long term satisfied with your church. If they were the type of person to be satisfied, they’d have been so at their last church. If you let them, they’ll suck up a bunch of your time and emotional energy on their way out, which is why one pastor suggests ignoring them.
The Supporters
Wives
I’ve yet to hear about a church planter who wasn’t married when he founded his church. They always describe their wives as also experiencing a call from God to be a pastor’s wife, which is extremely convenient.
By default, wives end up with whatever church work their husband doesn’t want or is bad at. This is especially likely to be work that requires high conscientiousness, involves children, or involves other women. They also need to do all the work at home that their partner isn’t doing because pastoring is sucking up all their time, or perhaps provide income because the church can’t fully support the family. And they’re doing most of the parenting.
Pastors’ wives are expected to make friends with the women of the church but also keep their problems private, because it would undermine their husband’s job if people knew he was unreliable about taking out the trash.
Overall church wife-ing seems like at least as much work as pastoring, with fewer rewards.
Support Teams
Many pastors mention launching with other families from their sending church. They frequently discuss how important support teams are, but almost never what their supporters did that was so valuable. Maybe music? Surely set up and tear down. And it’s useful to have people in the pews right from the beginning so nonbelievers don’t walk into an empty church. But overall this feels like a blank spot in my knowledge because the support team never goes on podcasts and for all that pastors sing their praises, they rarely give specifics.
I posit that pastors are performing the equivalent of thanking the little people at their Oscar speech because they know they’re supposed to, but don’t believe it in their heart of hearts that other people are very important. In contrast, you do tend to incidentally hear about the work their wives do.
Mission Teams
You know how churches sometimes send teenagers to Mexico for a week to build houses? Well sometimes they instead send those teens to a recently planted domestic church, to ring doorbells, volunteer at vacation bible school, or do manual labor. These have only come up in one episode, which was spent complaining about how they were worse than useless (under the guise of acknowledging that the pastors didn’t know how to use them productively). The most useful function mentioned was mowing the pastor’s own lawn, to free up his time.
Conclusion
Biology has a concept called convergent evolution– that if you put two distantly related animals in the same ecological niche, they will evolve to be more similar to each other than their respective recent ancestors. Think dolphins evolving the same fins and tail as sharks, despite having bones and needing to breathe air. Silicon valley and church planting sure seem to me like they’ve gone through convergent evolution, but what is the ecological niche?
Some people really like attention
If you don’t have the energy to do the difficulty, sexy thing, you can get some reflected glory by funding it
Absence of traditional gatekeeping.
In the absence of a countervailing force, charismatic people will be more successful on the margin. That’s what charisma means.
If you don’t track the eggs broken in your omelette making, there’s no drive to minimize them.
Youth-worship
And when you combine those, what you get are hits-based economies and a lot of negative externalities.
Sources
Podcasts
Inside a CATHOLIC Megachurch (Protestant Perspective)
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church (all episodes)
Everything I Did Wrong as a Church Planter: A Million Part Series (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22)
The Lutheran Church Planter (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22)
New Churches Podcast (26/236 episodes)
Canadian Church Planting (10/41 episodes)
Terminal: The Dying Church Planter (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22)
CMN Church Planting Podcast (all episodes, as of 2025-06-22
Revitalize and Replace (4/236 episodes)
Ministry Wives (1/201 episodes)
Pastors Wives Tell All (1/332 episodes)
Articles
The Priority & Practice of Evangelism: Canadian Church Leader Perspectives in 2021
Do We Really Need Another Church Plant?
Evangelism and “Nones and Dones” in Canada
Books
The Evangelicals, by Frances Fitzgerald.
Thanks
Thanks to Patrick LaVictoire and the Roots of Progress Blog Building Initiative for feedback on this post. Thanks to my Patreon supporters and the CoFoundation Fellowship for their financial support of my work.
One of the most interesting posts I’ve read in a while. Thanks for writing this.