Why Churches Stop Multiplying
Recovering the DNA of God's mission: what we call multiplication, what it usually is, and why the difference matters more for Adventists
Introduction
When God created humanity, he wrote the impulse to multiply into the fabric of existence. The first word spoken to Adam and Eve was a commission, not a prohibition: "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28). The mandate was more than biological. It set multiplication as a basic principle of God's creating and redeeming purpose. The covenant with Abraham carried that trajectory further. God made him "a father of many nations" (Genesis 17:5), and through faith all who believe become Abraham's spiritual offspring, heirs of the same multiplying mission (Galatians 3:29). Christopher Wright reads the Great Commission itself as a Christological form of the original Abrahamic commission: go, and be a blessing to the nations.¹
Yet much of the contemporary church, including significant sectors of the Adventist movement, has largely abandoned that impulse. Many congregations have settled into a culture of maintenance. They measure success by institutional stability rather than missionary fruitfulness, by the number of people in the pews rather than the number of disciples sent into the world.
Ask a pastor whether his church has ever planted another. Sometimes the answer comes with pride: yes, a few years ago. It is worth pressing and asking how it happened. The story often changes color. There was a disagreement. A group of young adults, thought to be too liberal, wanted a less formal way of doing things. The conversation soured, they left, and on the other side of town a congregation was born. It appears in the records as a new congregation, and in some report it entered the church planting column. But there was no sending, no preparation, nothing of what happens when a church decides to give birth to another. There was a rupture, and the congregation that came out of it carries the scar. It tends to repeat the habits of the church it left, and it almost never wants to give birth to a third.
That is part of the problem this essay diagnoses. Adventist churches do sometimes multiply. Much of what we call multiplication, however, is something else, a split, an overflow, or an administrative reorganization, and as long as we call it by that name we will fix nothing. What follows examines the theological, cultural, and structural reasons churches do not multiply, and proposes biblical and practical paths toward recovering a culture of multiplication.
The DNA of multiplication in God's redemptive plan
The biblical narrative, from Genesis to Revelation, is structured by the principle of multiplication. God's redemptive purpose was never only to gather individuals into one community. It was to generate communities that generate other communities, an ever-widening network of faithful witness that reaches "every nation, tribe, tongue, and people" (Revelation 14:6).
The early church embodied that principle with extraordinary vitality. The community described in Acts did not grow only by addition. It multiplied, from Jerusalem to Judea, to Samaria, and toward the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). That expansion was not the product of a centralized strategic plan. It came from a decentralized movement of equipped disciples who carried the gospel into every setting they entered. Alan Hirsch argues that this apostolic dynamic belongs to a small set of generative elements, which he calls missional DNA (mDNA), present in every authentic expression of the church. Those elements often lie dormant in institutional settings, and they can be reactivated through deliberate theological recovery and the formation of leaders.²
Ellen White expressed the same conviction from within the Adventist tradition: "The church is God's appointed agency for the salvation of men. It was organized for service, and its mission is to carry the gospel to the world."³ That definition, the church organized for service and existing for mission, implies that a church which has stopped reproducing spiritually has drifted from its constitutive purpose.
The contradiction of spiritual infertility
A church that does not multiply contradicts its own nature. Biological life is marked by the capacity to reproduce, and church life is marked by the capacity to generate new disciples, new leaders, and new communities of faith. When a church loses that reproductive capacity, it does not merely stop growing. It begins to die, imperceptibly at first and then unmistakably.⁴
A few images show the different forms that infertility can take.
The bonsai church. A bonsai tree is not sick. It is healthy, beautiful, well cared for, and it grows old at exactly the size it began, because the roots that could have produced growth were pruned when it was young. The bonsai did not choose to be small. Someone decided for it, very early, and maintenance did the rest. That is what happens to many small congregations that never become organized churches. They absorbed a culture of maintenance at the start, became dependent on someone to care for them, and that dependence came to be mistaken for identity. No one woke up one day and decided not to grow. The pruning happened at the beginning.
The Ferrari church. This congregation is richly equipped with resources, technology, facilities, and talent, and it lacks the one thing that justifies its existence: movement. A Ferrari parked forever in the garage, however beautiful, does not fulfill its purpose. A church that pours its resources into institutional refinement without producing disciples or planting congregations has confused excellence with faithfulness.
The Dead Sea church. The Dead Sea has rivers flowing in and no outlet, and so it sustains no life. A church that only absorbs, resources, teaching, pastoral care, without flowing out into its community produces spiritual stagnation. The Sea of Galilee, by contrast, thrives precisely because it receives and releases, and a whole ecosystem lives around it.
The cruise-ship church. This congregation is organized around the comfort and satisfaction of its current members. Every program, every service, every allocation of resources is judged by member satisfaction rather than missionary impact. But the church was never designed to be a cruise ship. It was designed to be a sending ship, a community that equips, forms, and sends believers into the world.
Against all four stands an image of what we want. Anyone who mows a lawn knows the experience of pulling every weed on a Sunday afternoon and finding them back two weeks later. Nobody planted them. The grass was watered, and they came with it. That is the picture of a multiplying church: it multiplies because it was conditioned to do so, not because someone organized a campaign. "So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase" (1 Corinthians 3:7). The difference between the bonsai and the weed is not effort. Both receive water. The difference lies in what was done with the root at the beginning, which is why the first months of a new congregation determine which of the two it will be for decades.
Barriers to multiplication
The addition mindset
Many churches operate within what can be called a culture of addition, a paradigm in which growth means accumulating new members in existing structures. Addition is not wrong. It is insufficient. The New Testament vision is multiplicative: disciples who make disciples who make disciples, leaders who form leaders, churches that plant churches that plant churches. The difference between addition and multiplication is the difference between linear growth and exponential impact. A church that adds a hundred members a year will grow steadily; a church that multiplies its disciples and communities will generate a movement. Alan Hirsch, introducing the Fergusons' Exponential, puts it plainly: the church "must move from addition to multiplication," multiplying the number of churches and not only adding numbers to existing ones.⁵
Todd Wilson describes three cultures that churches actually produce, whatever they say they want. A culture of subtraction is marked by scarcity: the church operates to survive, and every decision is read through what is lacking. A culture of addition is marked by an insatiable drive for the next growth barrier. It is the best-intentioned culture and the hardest to see, because it produces visible movement. A culture of multiplication is marked by release rather than consumption and movement rather than accumulation, and the question that organizes it is not how many we have but who is next.⁶
Addition is invisible to those inside it. It does not present itself as a choice; it presents itself as the normal way of doing things. We define success as growth by addition, and no committee voted for this. It is an assumption that runs through nearly everything we do, and once success means addition, practices, celebrations, and reports all line up behind it. Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird, surveying renewed interest in church planting in North America, noted that the trend "focuses largely on addition rather than multiplication."⁷ Addition does not always lead to reproduction, but reproduction always leads to addition. Addition asks how many we have gathered; multiplication asks how many we have sent.
The structural plateau
Pastors who have served small and mid-sized congregations will recognize a familiar ceiling: a church that grows to the point where one pastor can still know every member by name, and then stops. At that size the congregation functions as an extended family, and the pastor is its center. That plateau is less a demographic phenomenon than a structural and leadership one. Growing past it requires a basic change in the culture of leadership, from pastoral care delivered by one leader to an equipping leadership that releases many ministers. Many churches cannot or will not make that transition, and they remain on the plateau indefinitely.
The absence of a multiplying vision
Without a clear, theologically grounded vision of multiplication, churches default to the path of least resistance, institutional self-preservation. The urgent displaces the important; maintenance displaces mission; the internal needs of current members displace the outward call to reach those who have not heard. What distinguishes multiplying churches from stagnant ones is less their resources, location, or affiliation than whether their leadership sees multiplication as a biblical imperative rather than an optional strategy.
There is a simple test. List the most influential Adventist churches you know, notable congregations doing good work for the kingdom. Then ask how many of them multiply, how many send out more people than they keep, how many invest more in planting than in facilities, how many plant autonomous churches rather than dependent groups, and how many can trace more than ten existing churches to their own roots. If the list of the most influential and the list of those that answer yes are not the same list, the problem is not performance. It is the definition of success.
Institutional rigidity
Rigid organizational structures and centralized leadership patterns can smother the creativity, entrepreneurial energy, and distributed authority that multiplication requires. Multiplication needs flexible, adaptable structures that strengthen local initiative, release new leaders, and tolerate the creative untidiness that accompanies every genuine movement. Structure in the church exists to serve the growth of people in the gospel. When the structure becomes the focus of attention and energy, the people it was meant to support are neglected.
Paths to multiplication
Cultivating a culture of multiplication
Moving from a culture of maintenance or addition to a culture of multiplication requires a basic change in institutional identity. Todd Wilson and Dave Ferguson, writing with Alan Hirsch, describe five levels of operation, from churches in survival and decline, through plateaued and adding churches, to reproducing and finally multiplying churches.⁸ Tim Hawks and Larry Walkemeyer, applying the framework to the United States, estimate that roughly 80 percent of churches are in decline or have plateaued, 15 to 20 percent are adding, about 4 percent reproduce, and only a tiny fraction multiply.⁹
Those numbers are not ours. They come from another country, other denominations, and nearly a decade ago, and I know of no comparable survey of Adventist churches. They are useful as a proportion to think with, not as a diagnosis of any particular field. The challenge is to move toward reproduction and multiplication through a transformation in how the community understands itself, and not merely through programmatic innovation.
Churches that decide to multiply meet three tensions, which Wilson and Ferguson name as motives, measures, and methods.¹⁰ The tension of motives is rooted in the definition of success: is the vision limited to gathering and growing here, or balanced by an equal passion for sending there? The tension of measures is rooted in priority. Most churches plan to send once they have grown and have the resources, and that day never arrives, because something is always missing. The better question is how to strengthen the local platform in a way that also increases its capacity to send. The tension of methods is rooted in pragmatism: where the church puts its money, time, and energy. When methods align with motives and measures, the whole system changes, from the liturgy and building plans to the training, the budget, the board meetings, and the way members live.
Micro and macro strategies
Effective multiplication works on two levels at once. At the micro level it is the daily work of making disciples who make disciples, the relational, personal, Spirit-led process of forming believers who are equipped and motivated to reproduce their faith in others. Paul's instruction to Timothy describes the chain: "the things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also" (2 Timothy 2:2). At the macro level it is the strategic work of developing leaders, planting new congregations, and building organizational systems that support and sustain multiplication across regions and cultures. Both levels are essential; neither suffices without the other.
Breaking through the plateau
Churches that break the plateau usually do so through a decisive shift, from pastor-centered ministry to equipping leadership. Instead of investing in larger facilities to fit more members into a single congregation, they invest in forming and releasing leaders able to establish new communities of faith. The decision to multiply rather than simply enlarge is the turning point in the move from a culture of addition to a culture of multiplication. It requires pastoral courage, institutional flexibility, and a theology of leadership that values strengthening others above enlarging one's own congregation.
Breaking the maintenance cycle
The maintenance cycle feeds on itself. A church focused on institutional preservation directs its resources inward, which reduces its missionary engagement, which diminishes its spiritual vitality, which increases its dependence on institutional programs to survive, producing exactly the stagnation it was trying to avoid. Darrell Guder and his colleagues described the end point of that cycle as the church understood as a vendor of religious goods and services.¹¹ Breaking the cycle requires more than strategic adjustment. It requires recovering the church's founding vision: the conviction that the church does not exist for itself but for the world God loves.
The multiplying cycle runs the other way. A church that invests in forming disciples who form disciples generates new energy, new leadership, and new communities, which in turn generate more of the same. That cycle is not self-sustaining in a mechanical sense. It requires continual dependence on the Holy Spirit, constant engagement with Scripture, and a leadership culture that values faithfulness above institutional comfort. It is the cycle that marked the apostolic church, and it remains available to every congregation willing to embrace it.
Personal transformation
The move from maintenance to multiplication begins with the individual. Pastors and leaders have to embody the missional lifestyle they hope to cultivate in their congregations, with rhythms of spiritual renewal, deliberate engagement with the community, and the daily practice of discipleship. Ellen White counseled that ministers not monopolize ministry: "Ministers should not do the work which belongs to the church, thus wearying themselves, and preventing others from performing their duty. They should teach the members how to labor in the church and in the community."¹²
Leadership development
The most strategic investment a church can make is the development of leaders, men and women formed in the character of Christ, equipped with the skills of ministry, and released to lead new expressions of the church in new settings. That requires formation that goes beyond administrative competence and cultivates the spiritual depth, missional imagination, and practical wisdom that multiplication demands. Hirsch's account of the fivefold ministry of Ephesians 4 offers one way to think about a leadership that is distributed across the body rather than concentrated in the pastor.¹³
Missional engagement
Finally, multiplying churches are marked by a constant outward orientation: a commitment to be present in the community, to serve its needs, and to bear witness to the reconciling love of Christ. Paul's language is decisive. God "has given us the ministry of reconciliation" and "committed to us the word of reconciliation" (2 Corinthians 5:18–19). That ministry is not an internal institutional function. It is the basic reason the church exists.
An objection: is this not simply a strategy borrowed from elsewhere?
A careful Adventist reader may object that much of this framework comes from an evangelical network in the United States, with its own assumptions about growth, and that a prophetic movement should not take its measure of faithfulness from a church growth typology.
The objection is right to be suspicious of borrowed scorecards, and the framework should be credited to its authors rather than presented as our own. But the reason multiplication weighs more heavily on Adventists is not efficiency. It is coherence. A church that believes the Lord is coming soon and operates in a culture of maintenance is saying two incompatible things at once. If his return is near, accumulation makes no sense; if accumulation makes sense, we do not really believe what we preach. That contradiction is visible in the budget. The ratio between what a church invests in facilities and what it invests in planting and forming leaders is the most honest statement of eschatology a church produces. The urgency we read in Revelation 14 is the reason multiplication, for us, is not one strategy among others. It is the way of operating that corresponds to what we say we believe.
A church can begin with two numbers from last year's budget: what went to facilities and maintenance, and what went to planting and leadership formation. The ratio between them is its culture, measured.
Conclusion
The lack of multiplication in contemporary churches reflects a deeper crisis, a crisis of vision, of identity, and of missional faithfulness. When churches settle for maintenance, they contradict the nature of the God who created them for multiplication. When they settle for addition, they fall short of the movement that marked the apostolic church.
Recovering a culture of multiplication requires theological conviction, pastoral courage, structural flexibility, and the willingness to measure faithfulness by reproductive fruitfulness rather than institutional stability. It requires a return to the founding command, "Be fruitful and multiply." And it requires trust that the God who gave that command is also the God who enables his people to keep it, through his Spirit, his Word, and communities of faith willing to be scattered in order to be multiplied.
May our churches become what they were created to be: movements of divine multiplication rather than monuments to human achievement, fulfilling the Great Commission, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations" (Matthew 28:19).
Notes
1. Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative (IVP Academic, 2006), chap. 6, "God's Elect People: Chosen for Blessing"; on the Great Commission and the Abrahamic commission, 213.
2. Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements, 2nd ed. (Brazos, 2016), chap. 3, "Preparing for the Journey."
3. Ellen G. White, The Acts of the Apostles (Pacific Press, 1911), 9.
4. See Craig Ott and Gene Wilson, Global Church Planting: Biblical Principles and Best Practices for Multiplication (Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 4, "Church Multiplication and Indigenous Church-Planting Movements," 65–88.
5. Alan Hirsch, foreword to Dave Ferguson and Jon Ferguson, Exponential: How You and Your Friends Can Start a Missional Church Movement (Zondervan, 2010), 11.
6. Todd Wilson, Spark: Igniting a Culture of Multiplication (Exponential, 2014), introduction, EPUB.
7. Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird, Viral Churches: Helping Church Planters Become Movement Makers (Jossey-Bass, 2010), 12.
8. Todd Wilson and Dave Ferguson, with Alan Hirsch, Convirtiéndonos en una iglesia multiplicadora nivel cinco: Guía de campo (Exponential, 2015), 26. The English original is Becoming a Level Five Multiplying Church: Field Guide.
9. Tim Hawks and Larry Walkemeyer, Beyond 4: Leading Your Church to Level 5 Multiplication (Exponential, 2017), 93–94.
10. Wilson and Ferguson, Convirtiéndonos en una iglesia multiplicadora, 27, 108.
11. Darrell L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Eerdmans, 1998), 83–84.
12. Ellen G. White, Historical Sketches of the Foreign Missions of the Seventh-day Adventists (Imprimerie Polyglotte, 1886), 291.
13. Hirsch, Forgotten Ways, chap. 8, "APEST Culture."
Bibliography
Ferguson, Dave, and Jon Ferguson. Exponential: How You and Your Friends Can Start a Missional Church Movement. Zondervan, 2010.
Guder, Darrell L., ed. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. Eerdmans, 1998.
Hawks, Tim, and Larry Walkemeyer. Beyond 4: Leading Your Church to Level 5 Multiplication. Exponential, 2017.
Hirsch, Alan. The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements. 2nd ed. Brazos, 2016.
Ott, Craig, and Gene Wilson. Global Church Planting: Biblical Principles and Best Practices for Multiplication. Baker Academic, 2011.
Stetzer, Ed, and Warren Bird. Viral Churches: Helping Church Planters Become Movement Makers. Jossey-Bass, 2010.
White, Ellen G. The Acts of the Apostles. Pacific Press, 1911.
———. Historical Sketches of the Foreign Missions of the Seventh-day Adventists. Imprimerie Polyglotte, 1886.
Wilson, Todd. Spark: Igniting a Culture of Multiplication. Exponential, 2014. EPUB.
Wilson, Todd, and Dave Ferguson, with Alan Hirsch. Convirtiéndonos en una iglesia multiplicadora nivel cinco: Guía de campo. Exponential, 2015.
Wright, Christopher J. H. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative. IVP Academic, 2006.
Comments