Association’s churches had to ‘buy in’ before planting success took off

NEW BRAUNFELS? It took J.K. Minton two years to convince existing churches in his association to plant new ones. Not only were upstart churches seen as competition, established church leaders “didn’t even believe the demographics showing our region as 70 percent unchurched,” Minton, director of missions in Bluebonnet Baptist Association, recalled.

The BBA, based in New Braunfels, now has a mentality among its member churches that helps the association’s church planting efforts succeed beyond the national average, Minton said.

Serving the eight counties along the I-35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio, the BBA has planted 23 churches in the past eight years; 18 of those still meet and 13 are self-supporting. The national survival rate of church plants is 50 percent.

“Our new churches are baptizing people at a much higher rate than the national average,” said Robby Partain, BBA associate director of missions, noting that in 2006 the rate among all Southern Baptist churches was 2.5 baptisms per 100 resident members as compared to 12 per 100 attendees in BBA church plants.

Ranging in age from 18 months to eight years, the BBA’s new churches baptized 328 people last year, representing more than half the baptisms among all 70 BBA churches.

“Our process works,” Minton said. “A major reason is the level of buy-in we have from all our churches. Martindale Baptist Church is 150 years old, and has assisted in several new church starts.”

But before that “buy-in” mentality existed, the prevailing attitude was to fill current churches that had been half-full for years.

“I managed to convince those leaders that if we didn’t start new churches, then we would fail regarding the Great Commission in Acts 1:8 as people in our area would become increasingly lost,” Minton said.

Parsing the Process

“The Bluebonnet Association’s church planting process is one of the most effective I know of anywhere,” said Terry Coy, missions director for the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. “And that is for several reasons. Church planting is the passion of Drs. Minton and Partain, and of the pastors and churches partnering with them.

Also, the process is well organized and implemented, fostering consistency, accountability, and quality control.

“It’s not a ‘cookie-cutter’ approach in that it allows for contextualization, and thereby works well for a variety of models and styles of church planting. And it includes numerous pastors and churches in the process, which keeps it from becoming ingrown and encourages its acceptance.”

Both Minton and Partain said established BBA churches not only support church planting philosophically and theologically, but financially too. Of the quarter-million church planting dollars the BBA receives, 54 percent comes from its own sources. Also, four of every $10 comes from BBA partner churches and new church plants.

Built into every BBA-funded church plant budget is a non-negotiable requirement that 10 percent of undesignated receipts support missions. Fashioned after the “Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the world” mandate of Acts 1:8, the 10 percent is divided among local church planting, the association, the state convention, and the Southern Baptist Convention.

With a rigorous qualifying process for planters, the BBA maintains a balance between support and accountability through teams of churches overseeing the planter and the plant.

“We broke the old ‘mother-daughter’ church paradigm,” Minton said, noting it fostered “too much parental control” and could stifle or kill the new church.

Accordingly, Minton developed church plant oversight teams consisting of leaders from three other BBA churches, which dilutes the potential for imposing a set ministry model. BBA planters, however, must follow doctrinal, financial and personal accountability parameters as monitored by the oversight team, Minton noted.