Michael Kyker.com

I have become a church planting junkie. I have.

To be honest, my experience level with pastoring people and building leadership was decent, but when it came to planting a church…I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

A couple of weeks back, I read a study on church planting. This particular group did a study on 2800 church plants nationwide. Their criteria was this…

• Must be between the age of 3yrs and 6yrs.
• Must be total self-sufficient financially. (No outside financial support)
• Must be in a city of more than 30,000 people.
• Had an average active membership of more than 200.

Here is what they found…out of the 2800 churches that fit that criteria only 7% of them met those requirements. I mean really…7%? That is only 196 congregations…

That floored me.

God has been good to us. We struggled hard for our first year and a half. I wasn’t for sure if I had the juice to keep hitting the wall and getting up, but then something broke. The truth hurts sometimes and our services sucked when we first started. Now, we have mostly awesome Sundays, some decent ones, and every once in a while a few bad ones, however, God has been good to CFAN.

Here is what we have to be thankful for…

• At ten months old, we bought property with only our church doing the heavy lifting. God made it happen.
• We have millions in assets and we are only 31 months old. God made it happen.
• Our active membership has finally inched over 200. This is the biggest miracle considering that I run off alot of people
• We have some of the best, most loyal, and zealous leaders anywhere. I mean that. It is not just something that I say because it’s a blog or I have to…I mean it. He is the Lord of the harvest…He always knows just what we need.
• We started out trying to reach people around my age (30s) but in the process we have truly become a multi-generational church. All ages worship alongside each other every Sunday.
• 35 Salvations and 85 baptisms!
• Our children’s programs is just amazing. This is a pretty big deal considering it is hard getting a solid kid’s ministry off the ground. The amount of volunteers it takes for all the services, classes, and age groups is amazing.
• God has been so good to us and the best is yet to come!