Why the Collective is needed now…

When we started Resonate Church in 2007 nobody knew what a collegiate church plant was. There were a handful of people doing this around the nation but it wasn’t a proven concept the way it is today. Most people who heard about our plan were not only skeptical but blatantly told us it wouldn’t work.

A very well-known Seattle megachurch pastor at the time (you know who) was confident it wouldn’t work and told us so – simply because college students wouldn’t be able to support the ministry.

He wasn’t entirely wrong. Students don’t support the ministry – at least not entirely. Students have proven to be essential to other aspects of a healthy church such as leadership development and service but they just don’t have the capacity to support the church and certainly not the staff financially.

Thankfully God is good at directing funds toward those things he wants to grow.

Nearly two decades later the concept of collegiate church planting is well established and people all over the country are believing what we believe: that the college campus is the most strategic mission field in the West.

Now, in 2024, we’re in a similar moment. The future of the church in the West looks very different than it has for the last 50 years.

But this isn’t a new trend. The last time that church planting kept pace with population growth was during WWI. That means that for over 100 years now, our population has been growing faster than the American church’s potential to reach that population with the gospel.

Many factors affect our ability to multiply and make disciples among our lost neighbors.

Here are a few that we believe we can actually improve.

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

If there’s one thing God has taught us, it’s the need for qualified and stable leaders to plant churches. We’re thankful this is baked into our environment. The college campus is a natural sending and development engine.

However, we also believe God has taught us some universal principles about developing church leaders that can transfer to other models and contexts.

That’s why our NEXT team aims to come alongside churches and help them develop their sending capacity by building a strong leadership development culture that helps every believer live into their calling in God’s kingdom and accelerates church planting by identifying, training, and deploying church planting teams.

While individual churches may not develop leaders and send full teams to plant churches on their own, every church can send individuals or small groups who desire to be sent with church planters from other churches within the Collective.

This allows the local church to fulfill its sending mandate and to empower individuals who may already be “going” to go with gospel intentionality.

When we share leadership resources, we can seize more missional opportunities and get more of God’s people in the game.

We aim to be the answer to the prayer of Luke 10:2 and intentionally develop workers for the harvest as the Lord of the harvest calls them to His work.

SIMPLE SYSTEMS

If we’re going to rapidly develop leaders and plant churches we’ll need to develop simple, scalable pathways to planting and leading churches.

That’s the advantage of building a network. You multiply your capacity for learning and sharing resources. Imagine you’re planting a church and you hit a roadblock. You find that it’s really hard to reach the people God is calling you to reach. But, then you connect to someone in your church network who has reached a similar group of people in a similar context and they can teach you how they did it. All of a sudden you feel like Luke Skywalker discovering Obi-Wan Kenobi. Finally, you’re unstuck on your way to becoming a church planting master!

Or imagine that you’re a young church plant and your core team is just starting to have kids and grow their families. Wouldn’t it be great to have a sister church connected to your church with members and leaders who can share lessons they’ve learned the hard way? One of the hardest parts of leadership is paying the dumb tax (the pain of not knowing the way). Someone else has already paid that tax for you. Networks help us learn from the mistakes of others and help one another get ahead.

Or, maybe your church sees an opportunity to bless a needy demographic in your city or begin some kind of mercy ministry. Connecting to a network might give access to relationships and examples. These relationships might save you weeks, if not months of struggle and learning the difficult way.

Often the best solution to our problems is something simple especially when we’re just getting started.

Our goal as the Collective is to become world-class at fostering innovation and creating or curating simple systems for meeting ministry needs. Then, to take those innovations and create collaborative communities where people can take what God is doing in one place and amplify it to many more places. This is the specific focus of our Amplify team.

CREATIVE FUNDING

Another challenge facing the church is funding. Part of tackling the funding issue is by operating with a leaner model of church. At Resonate we’ve partially achieved this by developing ways for our staff to raise their own salaries like missionaries overseas. We call this Ministry Partner Development or MPD.

This funding model, while challenging at times, has allowed us to deploy far more people into vocational ministry than the typical church and to plant more rapidly because funding isn’t the most limiting factor.

We’re more committed than ever to developing our systems and tools for training, supporting, and coaching fundraising staff both in our Resonate churches and for churches that may partner with us in the Resonate Collective.

But innovative fundraising doesn’t stop with MPD.

I believe that the future of the church requires that we tear down the wall, or bridge the gap between the church world and the marketplace. The majority of students and 99 percent of the church in America are people who spend 40+ hours a week out in the world.

What if we raised their vision for what it means to be generous? What if we raised their vision for the value of their work in the kingdom? Their work is sacred and capable of transforming the people they work with. They can also play a vital role in accelerating the work of the church through giving.

What if we could build teams of people who are good at making money and help connect them to a compelling vision for a better future for the church?

We’re actively learning from people who are already doing this within their churches and networks to find creative ways to fund God’s work through the church and church planting.

The final layer would be to intentionally develop a network of alumni who give back to Resonate after they graduate. We’ve built this unintentionally through having support-raising staff but we’re excited to develop an intentional partnership with alumni who may have a greater capacity to fund ministry ventures or who particularly love to generate wealth and give to kingdom causes.

THE FUTURE CHURCH

What collegiate church planting did for college ministry paradigms networks will be for church planting and multiplication in the next 10 years. The Collective is built to become a network of networks. We want to empower people to come together around a shared vision or mission field and then help them unlock their potential for multiplication within that mission field.

Networked churches will become more and more common as leaders collaborate and share resources to accomplish more together than they could do on their own.

In our part of the country – the West and Mountain West – resources are scarce. Then we tried to reach the most unreached demographic on the college campus. To overcome these challenges we’ve had to adapt and innovate constantly.

But we’re not the only church that needs this innovative culture. We’re not the only church that needs strong leadership pipelines and simple, scalable methods.

Reaching the West again is going to take a highly adaptable, highly collaborative church. The more of these churches we can link together, the better.

We are excited to continue learning from other groups as we build relationships with like-minded churches.

We’re truly better together.

If you want to learn more about how networking with other churches can help you unlock kingdom potential schedule a call with us.