Church Planting

The Tenderloin district of San Francisco is one square mile. There are 37,000 people in that one square mile living in 586 apartment buildings. And San Francisco City Impact wants to plant a church in every single one of those apartments.

Francis Chan, author of Crazy Love and former pastor of Cornerstone Community Church, is working with the new initiative, called Adopt a Building. SFCI provides food, clothing and housing for those in the San Francisco area. Christian Huang, operations director for the new initiative, told The Christian Post that Adopt a Building is filling a need in the community that wasn’t being met before. It was the “missing component of City Impact,” he said.

The idea is simple. First they pick a building and get a prayer team together to start praying for residents in the building. Then a “grace team” is assembled to knock on the doors of every residence in the building. more >>

In the history of the more than 2,000-year-old Christian Church, megachurches have only been around for about 1 percent of the time, according to one California pastor, yet they continue to grow in numbers and sizes, impacting the rest of the world.

An infographic recently done by the graphic design and statistical research company, Good, attempts to show what the average megachurch looks like. It reveals that 83 percent of the megachurches in the U.S. grew in 2009.

A megachurch is defined by the company as a Protestant congregation with 2,000 or more members. The definition also includes the note that megachurches differ in style, targeting young people with services that are often held in auditoriums and theaters instead of worship halls. more >>

SANTA ANA, Calif. – The Orange County version of Seattle-based megachurch Mars Hill has a new home in an unconventional setting, it was announced Sunday.

Although members of Mars Hill Church Orange County have been meeting at various locations on Saturday evenings since August, the church doesn’t officially launch until January.

This coming Saturday evening, Dead Man’s Party, an Oingo Boingo tribute band, plays at The Galaxy Theatre, a mostly punk rock concert hall in Santa Ana. On Sunday morning at 10 a.m., the somewhat crusty building becomes the site of Mars Hill Orange County’s first church service in its newly leased facility. more >>

A pair of churches each bearing the name "Mars Hill" have made amends after nearly beginning a legal battle over who possessed rights to the name.

Seattle's Mars Hill Church issued a cease and desist letter to Sacramento's Mars Hill Community Church last week, presenting the possibility of legal action over the moniker both ministries share. Social media backlash brought both parties to the bargaining table, and the two have since reached an agreement where Mars Hill Community Church will change its logo.

"I want to thank the Mars Hill Seattle staff for demonstrating a genuine brotherhood and passion for the kingdom of God," said Scott Hagan, Mars Hill Community Church's senior pastor, in a Sunday blog post titled "A Response from Pastor Scott Hagan, Mars Hill Community (Sacramento) to the 'Cease and Desist' Issued by Mars Hill (Seattle).” more >>

As editor and online facilitator of a website that includes a global community of 80,000 pastors and church leaders registered with the site, Pastor Brandon Cox has read his share of criticisms of today’s Christian Church.

And he’s tired of it.

Two years ago, Cox was recruited by Pastor Rick Warren’s team at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., to help with its already well-developed global online community of pastors. His mission: take the church’s website which is dedicated to equip pastors, Pastors.com, to the next level. more >>

A Vancouver, Wash., church that quickly needed $1 million in order to stay in a former K-Mart building received the money through donations one week ahead of closing its 40-day fundraising campaign, said its pastor.

Living Hope Church Pastor John Bishop, who wrote the book Dangerous Church, which is primarily about the risk-taking culture of his congregation, began the campaign a month ago. He not only asked the church’s 6,000 members to give to the fund, but other churches as well.

The church had to move from a former Mervyns mall store late last year after the property was bought by a movie theater company, Bishop told The Christian Post. He said the church was teetering on the possibility of being the "first homeless megachurch in the nation." more >>