The Fastest Way to Grow Your Church Isn't Getting Bigger. It's Starting Something New.

If you've made it to 100 members, you already know the quiet tension that comes next. You've worked hard to fill the room, and now you're wondering whether the goal is simply to fill it fuller. Bigger building. Bigger budget. Bigger crowd. But something inside you senses that just adding more people to the same room isn't the whole calling.

Here's the truth that changes everything: nothing grows a church faster than starting something new. A new group. A new service. A new campus. A new church. The most fruitful move for a church at or past 100 usually isn't getting bigger. It's birthing something.

This is the 100+ horizon, and it belongs to multiplication.

Why new works grow faster than old ones

The numbers here are genuinely striking, especially for smaller churches. A brand new work grows about 170% faster in its first five years than it ever will in the years that follow. People in a church under five years old are 31% more likely to invite others to faith and 52% more likely to share their faith than at any other season in that church's life.

New works are also cheaper to grow. The median cost to reach a first-year attender in a new work is about $460, compared to $1,667 per attender in ongoing annual cost at churches over five years old. And smaller, newer works engage people more deeply. Single-site churches drew 53% more regular volunteers than multisite campuses, because the smaller the group, the higher the percentage of people who actually get involved.

Why does this matter for you? Because if you only ever add, you'll eventually re-plateau against the same ceilings you fought to break through. Multiplication is the structural escape.

Where most churches get stuck

Exponential describes five levels of multiplication: subtracting, plateaued, adding, reproducing, and multiplying. Somewhere between 80 and 90% of U.S. churches are stuck at the first two levels. Fewer than 4% ever reach reproducing (level four or beyond).

The reason is simple. Addition grows slowly. Multiplication compounds. Picture six leaders each raising up six more: 6 becomes 36, then 216, then 1,296. Addition asks how many you can gather. Multiplication asks how many you can send.

One warning before you begin

Multiplication will not fix a sick church. It extends a healthy one. That distinction is the whole ballgame. Before you launch anything, confirm your church is actually healthy and growing. A church plant born out of exhaustion or decline just multiplies the sickness.

So readiness is the gate. Start there.

Start with the cheapest move first

Here's the mistake I see pastors make. They dream about a campus or a plant before they've ever multiplied a single group. Don't skip the sequence.

Work cheapest-first: group, then service, then campus, then plant. New groups reach new people, while closed and aging groups quietly repel them. So begin by starting a new group or a new service. This is the multiplication move almost every church at 100 can make this year, with the resources already in the room.

Build multiplication into your culture early

Among new works, 74% carry a future vision to multiply, and 60% are intentional about raising up new group leaders. The healthiest churches talk multiplication early, openly, and often. Don't wait until you're crowded to introduce the idea of sending. Name it now, so that when the moment comes, your people are already expecting it.

When a plant is on the horizon

When you start dreaming toward a church plant, gauge your readiness by your supply of leaders, not the size of your bank account. Planting readiness means training elders and co-pastors fast enough to keep up with growth, plus identifying an apostolic gift, a genuine "sent one" ready to go.

There is no financial minimum. In fact, it costs less to start the kind of church that multiplies than to fund a sterile, traditional launch. Fund from fruit, not from a floor. The resources are in the harvest.

Think in five phases: conception, gestation, birth, maturity, and multiplication. And here's the key: design the plant to reproduce from the very beginning, not merely to survive.

Don't do it alone

One of the most powerful moves is joining or forming a network of pastors who each covenant to plant one church a year. That single commitment turns isolated effort into a movement. Imagine a church in every village, not because one hero church did it all, but because a band of ordinary pastors kept planting together.

A quick word on multisite: the usual thresholds (growing at least 5% a year, facility 80% full, a launch core of 75 to 100+, one staff member per 100 attenders) assume a sending church well over 100. For you, campuses come later. The near-term application is multiplying groups and services now, then a plant in a network.

What to do next

Stop measuring your future only by how full the room is. Ask instead what God might birth through you. Confirm your health, name multiplication out loud to your people, and make the cheapest new move available to you this season.

Your challenge this week

Identify one new group or service you could start in the next 90 days, and write down the name of one person you'll begin apprenticing to lead it. One group, one leader. That's how multiplication begins.