You Can’t Plant a Church If You Don’t Know What a Church Is
by Nathan Knight

Church Plants Need Pastors, Not Entrepreneurs
by Matt McCullough

The Priority of Patience, Prayer, and Preaching in Church Planting
by Josh Manley

The Church Planter’s Second Priority: Raising up Leaders
by Mike McKinley

Personal Evangelism for the Church Planter and the Church Plant
by J. Mack Stiles

Church Planters, Make Sure Your People Know You Love Them
by Steve Jennings

The Loneliness of Church Planting
by John Starke

The Blessings and Burdens of a Church Planter’s Wife
by Gloria Furman

Stop Launching Churches! Instead, Covenant Together
by Nathan Knight

The Calculated Risks of Church Planting: Sending Your Best Members and Elders
by Juan Sanchez

What 9Marks Purists Should Know About Church Planting
by Ed Stetzer

Church Planting in the Same Building
by Matthew Spandler-Davison

Lessons Learned from Church Planting by Peaceable Division
by Colin Clark

How to Do Ministry When You Don’t Have Money
by Brian Davis

Church Planting Across Ethnic Lines
by Joel Kurz

Church Planters, Don’t Wait to Put Your Documents in Place
by Joel Kurz

Planting Churches for Pleasure, Not for Profit
by Nathan Knight

Knowing When to Say When: Reflections from a Failed Church Plant
by Derek Bass

How to Merge Two Church Cultures
by Dave Russell

Church Mergers and Tolerable Irregularities
by Brad Wheeler

Anatomy of a Church Merger
by John Folmar

What I Learned from Two Failed Church Mergers
by Matthew Cunningham

When Two Become One: Legal Considerations of a Church Merger
by Jonathan Rourke

Editor’s Note:

Church mergers and church plants represent good news and bad news. The bad news is that it seems more and more churches are declining and in need of a restart. Church plants represent the good news: we have a bourgeoning supply of young pastors who desire to give themselves to the raising up and shepherding of God’s flock. And because we have more prospective pastors than open pulpits, we plant churches. Praise God for this “problem”!

9Marks isn’t primarily in the business of offering church planting wisdom. We’re not a planting ministry. Nonetheless, we want to think briefly about what our DNA means in this context. Perhaps the most important thing we can say is what Nathan Knight and Matt McCullough say in their articles: a church plant is a church, and a church planter is a pastor.

This Journal considers church planting—its loneliness, its effect on sending churches, its demand for creativity in the midst of financial difficulty. We also offer a few creative ideas about how to plant a new church. We won’t spoil them, but pay particular attention to articles by Matthew Spandler-Davison and Colin Clark.

Our world needs more healthy churches, which means our world needs more faithful pastors who are planting churches—creating something out of nothing—and merging churches—creating something healthy out of something less-than-healthy. Each discipline comes with a list of attenuating challenges and blessings; each requires an identical dependence on preaching the Word, praying, and sharing the gospel.

There’s more to be said, and we hope you’ll read on.

—Jonathan Leeman & Alex Duke