Getting Traineeships Going
By Pete Hughes
This is a transcript of the presentation given by Derek Hanna at our 2024 National Conference on the current state of church planting in Australia.
A couple of years ago Quan Ho sat on this stage being interviewed by Dan Lee. He was with Josh Allen from Laneway Church in Footscray, Victoria.
Quan told us about his heart to reach second and third generation Vietnamese people whom he had seen walking away from the church because they felt there was nothing for them. His hope was to plant a church to see them come to know Jesus and stick with him. He didn’t know Josh just six months before this. He decided to do a church planting residency to train at Laneway to learn what a healthy church looked like and then to plant out in order to reach these Vietnamese kids and young adults who didn’t know Jesus or were walking away. In April this year, Quan launched Anchor Church in Sunshine North out of Laneway Church.
About six months ago, Quan was contacted out of the blue by a young Vietnamese guy he’d led in a youth group ten years ago. He was intrigued about the gospel. He started coming to the launch team meetings and to the “Meet Jesus” meetings with Josh. On one of these evenings, Josh invited people to pray the prayer of repentance, which he did. He’s now a Christian.
This is the reason for Reach Australia. To reach the lost. And this is what we’re seeing happen again and again.
Our vision for planting is to see 300 churches by 2030. That’s a lot of churches. Hopefully by the end of 2024 there will have been 145 churches planted. That leaves about 155 churches to be planted over the next six years. That’s a lot of churches, isn’t it?
You might be thinking that it’s impossible to reach 155 churches. But we are sitting in a room where every single one of us believes that God raised Jesus from the dead: the impossible. Every single one of us is here because we are convinced that we were dead, and we are now alive in Christ: impossible. We are not the people to be talking about the impossible.
You might be saying, well, maybe not impossible, but it’s improbable. Let me add even more improbability to this. If we’re going to get to 155 church plants, we will need a whole bunch of leaders. I’ve estimated we’re likely to need about 800 leaders in the next six years to plant churches, fill teams in growing churches, fill vacancies, and fill people stepping out of ministry into different ministries. We’re going to need 800 more gospel workers. That’s intimidating, isn’t it?
Just recently, there was a study put out by some of our friends at Exponential examining how we were going in church planting from 2017 to 2021 using National Church Life Survey data.
NCLS: CHURCH PLANTING STUDY 2017-21
I don’t want you to get baffled by the numbers; the critical number is the 5% at the bottom. That equates to five churches planted for every 100 churches over five years. This averages 1% annually; one church planted for every 100 churches.
I looked at the numbers for our network recently. The average rate of multiplication across this network from 2019 to this point is 4% annually. This includes during COVID. If we keep on that trajectory to 2030, we will plant 300 churches.
What’s more, the 800 leaders that we need: if every single church in our network raises up one apprentice that they send into full-time gospel ministry, we will have more than enough leaders—just one per church.
At a talk he did recently, Ray Galea said that the way we often think God works is that “we believe in a God who can but probably won’t”. That resonated with me. I keep talking about these 300, but something in the back of my head thinks we probably won’t get there; God probably won’t do it. I want us to reconsider that. I want to say, “Actually, I think he is doing it”. In fact I think 300 is too conservative a number.
You may have seen one of those old sewing machines around, maybe at your grandparents’ house or at a hipster cafe. These old sewing machines have a flywheel at the bottom. When the flywheel is hit, it builds momentum and then evens things out. It stores kinetic energy and then it delivers it evenly; it evens out the bumps. I think that is what is happening here. What has happened in the last 15 or 20 years is this building of momentum, this flywheel.
God can do more than we ask or imagine. It is happening. Look across this room: 1,300 people this week across denominations with a shared gospel conviction about reaching Australia. That is the work of God. This is not triumphalism but acknowledging what God is doing at this moment in history. We are seeing new churches being planted, even this year.
It is this humble gospel partnership that sits at the heart of this network that seeks to reach Australia. It’s through prayer, and by God’s grace in this partnership that we’ll get there.
One, if you are thinking about planting: you are not alone in this. This is a partnership across the nation to reach the nation. So if you are curious, ask the question. You will not be alone in asking the question.
Secondly, for churches who are thinking about planting, we will do this better together. We have over 350 churches at the moment in the network to draw experience from, and to learn from; a flywheel to even out the challenges to help us move forward. We don’t want to leave you excited this week but not knowing what steps to take; come talk to us and join us.
