Planting new churches is the top priority of the postmodren/prechristian church.

The following are some examples of what church leaders have done to launch new churches. The examples come from our forums.

1. We had our launch yesterday with over 120! I was very pleased with everything! Our section of the county only has about 20,000 people. We did direct mail, ads, inserts and flyers. I was pleased with the turn out. We also looked into telemarketing but it would not work in this culture. 70% of the people in our church say that they check the caller ID before the pick up. Most will not pick up if they don't know who it is. Therefore, 10,000 phone calls sounded like a waste of time and resources. We are somewhere between the small town and full blown suburbs. In five years we will be over grown by Fort Worth. So at least we got in early with the plant and in three-five years we should hit 500.
2. Here are some things that have worked for us...but please remember that small towns (pop. 4200) are VERY different than large towns.
1) Hired a professional musician that specializes in doing alternative Christian music. Nobody has ever seen anything like us in the entire area. Not even Madison has anything like this.
2) Concentrated on doing a few things with excellence. Music, Message, Friendliness and Nursery. That's the drawback of a small launch team - you can't do anything else. So we made the goal to have these things be the best in all of S.W. WI.
3) We advertise constantly...in the paper, on the radio, by direct mail and we always try to be creative. We had 60 new people yesterday (counting kids). Humorous direct mail is knocking it out of the park for us. It gets the attention of the unchurched around here...Oh, could I tell stories.
4)The most important thing in my mind is vision casting to the core. Nothing works as good as a pumped up Christian who can't wait to go invite all their friends. That's why I asked you all for your vision stories a few months ago. Our core group handed out over 250 personal invitations.
5)We pray all the time - corporately and individually.
6) We continually do servant evangelism.
By the way, this is also where the small town dynamic takes over in a positive way. Everybody is talking about that new Church. I was interviewed in the local paper and they dedicated an entire page to the story of Hidden Valley with the title "It's a different kind of Church".
Awesome God stuff...Everything comes from Him.
Response:
To respond to your how question about how to get 200--it depends. I'm planting a UMC in Jackson, Wi...and you really need to have a metro area around you. If you do, you can do tele-marketing--but you have to dial up 20,000 to get a 200 response rate...Or combine it with direct mail, cable advertising, etc. Having said that, I'm in a town of 4,000, and its taken me 3.5 years to get to 200. So it goes. More important than the 200, we are at a place that has a culture expecting to grow, change, be challenged, and not have a personal chaplain. Anyway, that might get to your question.
4. When people comment on the Phones For You campaign, they frequently say that it will not work in my area because people are adverse to telemarketing.
I held the same opinion. I hate telemarketers -- though Jesus tells us to love our enemies. However, after a lot of prayer, I felt God calling us to use the phones for you strategy. We made over 13,000 phone calls and ended up with 330people at our launch on February 28, 1999. We had over 300 people in worship on Easter 2000.
I found that while people were negative toward telemarketing, they were excited to have a phone call from a new church. We only had one truly negative response out of 13,000 dial-ups.
Because all of our phone numbers were newly assigned, they either did not identify the caller on people's caller ids or people were just curious. Frequently, we had people get our number off their caller id and call us back to see what we anted. Go figure!