10 Things I Learned About Church Planting at Exponential 2026

This week, Amy and Tom Footson and I attended the Exponential on the Gold Coast, a conference that gathers church planters, pastors and denominational leaders from around the world to learn about how the church multiplies through planting churches that plant churches. It was so encouraging to be there with 800 other people who share a passion for church planting in Australia.

Here are ten things that stayed with me.

1. We all need to be asking, "What part is God calling me to play?"

Many of us assume that church planting is a specialty. A calling for some entrepreneurial church leaders. Perhaps, something other people do.

But what if every church embraced church planting as core to its identity and practice? Sure, not everyone will necessarily join a church plant team. But, as our Archbishop Ric said, everyone should hold the question: what is God calling me to contribute to the multiplication of his church? This is a new way of thinking, especially for us Anglicans who have put the vast majority of our time and energy on maintaining the status quo, and keeping the institution afloat. 

2. We need more confidence in God and His gospel, and less in the idolatrous logic of capitalism

In recent decades the Western church has used attractiveness and marketing too much as its growth strategy. Better branding. Sharper websites. A more compelling "offer" in a crowded market of options for how people spend their Sunday mornings. 

In the 2026 book Baal and the Gods of More, Andrew Root argues that the modern church’s anxious pursuit of more (more people, money, influence, innovation and measurable impact) can become a contemporary form of Baal worship: an attempt to secure life and overcome decline by generating endless growth. Churches have absorbed capitalism’s “logic of escalation,” assuming that survival depends upon constant expansion, better strategies and more creative leadership, but this turns people into resources, burdens pastors with producing results, and leaves congregations unable to recognise God’s action apart from visible success. This is not an argument against growth, but against the idolatry of growth when it is treated as the force that will save the church. 

Against this fertility religion of production and multiplication, we should put our trust in the living God, whose presence cannot be manufactured, and whose gospel is powerful. We should centre our ministry on prayer, proclamation, shared suffering and genuine encounters in which people hear and respond to the Word of God. 

Paul didn't come to Corinth with a sales pitch - come to my church because it’s awesome and you’re going to have a great time. He came, by his own admission, in weakness and fear and much trembling, so that the Corinthians' faith would rest not on human wisdom but on God's power (1 Corinthians 2:3-5). Kingdom growth has never run on image. It runs on the Spirit doing what only the Spirit can do in a human heart, and on us having the confidence to actually ask people the question, rather than hoping our polish will ask it for us.

3. Anglicans have a clericalism problem, and it's holding us back

This one is so true. And it came from our Archbishop.  The Anglican church has built a system, often without meaning to, where ministry is something ordained people do and everyone else supports. 

But where church planting is flourishing, more often than not it is being led by non-ordained people. Ordinary people with jobs and mortgages and school pick-ups, leading missional communities, and other creative expressions of church, not because there weren't enough clergy to go around, but because that's who the New Testament actually expects to be doing the work of ministry (Ephesians 4:11-12). If we want to see multiplication, we need to be willing to hand over far more of the mission than clericalism has trained us to.

4. There are many ways to plant.

It was clarifying to hear planting broken into three distinct shapes:

• Missional communities — small, organic, lay-led, diverse, designed to multiply rather than simply grow. Less an event you attend, more a household you belong to.

• Multiplication within existing churches — a congregation planting a second congregation from its own life, rather than starting from nothing.

• Replanting and revitalisation — new life breathed into a church that's running out of road, rather than a fresh plant on entirely new ground.

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None of these is the "real" way to plant. They're different tools for different soil, and most healthy planting movements are using all three at once. We should be seeing a “mixed ecology” of plants.

5. The non-Western church is doing things we've barely dreamed of

Bishop Moon Hing planted fifty churches in twelve years in West Malaysia. In Mozambique and Angola, the diocese have grown from four to twenty-one since 2021. Tanzania and India are seeing similar multiplication. These aren't outlier statistics. They're a picture of what the Spirit does when a church expects to multiply rather than merely survive.

It's tempting to explain this away as a different context, less institutional weight, fewer regulations, a more spiritually hungry culture. All partly true. But the deeper question Exponential kept putting to us was harder to dodge: why don't we expect this? What would it take for the Western church to actually anticipate multiplication on this scale, rather than being quietly impressed by it from a safe distance?

6. In Australia, new churches are seeing more conversion than established churches. By a lot.

The data is blunt about this: brand new churches see three to four times more conversions than established ones. Not three or four percent more. Three to four times.

There's no shame in that for existing churches. It's simply a reminder that newness carries its own evangelistic energy, an openness, a lower bar to entry, fewer inherited habits to navigate. If we care about people meeting Jesus for the first time, planting isn't a nice extra. It's one of the most effective things we can do.

7. Multiplying churches have a culture of apprenticeship

This was one of the more practical takeaways, and one that I really want us to pursue. In churches that genuinely multiply, every leader, of every group and every ministry, has an apprentice. Someone they're actively raising up.

It's a simple discipline with enormous consequences. A church without apprentices can grow, but it struggles to multiply, because multiplication requires more leaders than the current leaders can supply on their own. Paul told Timothy to entrust what he'd heard to reliable people who would in turn teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2). Four generations of discipleship in a single sentence. That's the culture we need to build.

8. Church planting in Australia has grown 84% in five years

From 90 plants to 166. Almost double, in half a decade. This is a movement that's already under way, reshaping what Australian Christianity looks like.

9. Church plants are reaching people the rest of us are missing

The numbers here are worth sitting with. Sixty eight percent of people in Australian church plants are under 46. Thirty six percent are aged 18 to 30. Twenty one percent identify as de-churched, people who once had some connection to church and have found their way back through a plant rather than an established congregation. And sixty two percent of the growth in these churches is coming from new Christians, not transfers from other congregations.

Church plants, in other words, aren't mostly rearranging the existing furniture of Australian Christianity. They're reaching people the rest of us have largely lost touch with, and doing it through actual conversion, not just better attendance.

10. There's no multiplication without dying to comfort

One of the most powerful talks was from Katherine Chow from HTB. She quoted John Stott, and it really struck me:

We would love church planting, mission and evangelism to come without cost. But that’s not the Jesus way. If we want to see the kind of fruit that is being produced in Malaysia, in Mozambique, and Tanzania, we have to be willing to lose something first. Our comfort. Our ease. Our preference for things staying as they are. Jesus put it more starkly still: whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for his sake will find it (Matthew 16:25).

Death to self. Take up the cross. It was always going to be the way, and it still is. 

What part is God calling you to play?

If any of this stirs something in you, I'd love to talk. Whether that's a conversation about a missional community, a role in an existing ministry, or simply working out what your part might be in all of this, get in touch.