[This is from the Launch Plan for New Way Church in Austin, TX. Yesterday: Advisory Board. Tomorrow: Adopted Parent Congregation(s).]

We cannot be the 1^st mover in the “Christian church” category in Austin, obviously, so our goal is to create a new category: “Christianity 2.0”. We will sacrifice market leadership in whatever areas are necessary in order to focus on our unique values and offerings. We will focus on opposite characteristics and not on similarities with category leaders / first movers. The goal is to communicate our differences in a compassionate, non-argumentative way to those who are looking for something different.

Advertising will focus on the “New Way” brand, appealing to people who are spiritually minded but view traditional christianity as outdated and no-longer in synch with postmodern reality. E.g., “Imagine a New Way of seeing God”, “No satisfied Christians here”, etc. Affiliation with the “New Church” umbrella brand will be clear. “New Way” draws on early apostolic Christianity’s original name, “The Way”, while also subtly evoking a more eastern, wholistic approach to spirituality. By tagging the brand with “Christianity 2.0” we emphasize the “New” in “New Way” and “New Church” in a way that appeals to postmodern tech-savvy adults looking for something more than just another flavor of old-school organized religion.

[This is from the Launch Plan for New Way Church in Austin, TX. Yesterday we talked about the commitment to No Premature Real Estate. Tomorrow I'll explain Service Evangelism.]

New churches often become hyperfocused early on on building programs. The good thing about a building program is that it gives the community a goal. But there are costs that come with this goal.

First, it is a self-serving goal and so tends to turn a community inward. Second, it locks the church in with regard to worship gathering size far too early. Third, it saps all the financial, emotional and physical energy of the congregation, preventing that energy from being used on more outward-facing programs. Fourth, it creates a long-term burden—in the form of maintenance and sometimes debt service—that not only draws money and energy away from outward-focused programs, but (when debt or additional grants are involved) it robs the congregation of an important sense of self-sufficency, making them into wards of the denomination. Finally, building programs encourage a “work hard today, so eventually everyone can stop working so hard altogether” mentality. The building of a building has no obvious followup goal to inspire and lead a community. Better long-term goals include things that will always need repeating—like sponsoring the planting of daughter churches. (See “Daughtering”, below.)

[This is from the Launch Plan for New Way Church in Austin, TX. Last week: Street to Kitchen. Tomorrow: Marketing Philosophy.]

This newer approach views the preexisting dedicated members not as a core to be nurtured, but as a potential leadership team to be immediately empowered and turned outward toward the crowd. Focus then becomes quickly identifying new potential leaders from the crowd of newcomers and carefully progressing them into positions of responsibility at a higher rate than in traditional church settings.

So rather than first meeting for worship in living rooms and doing pastor-led doctrinal studies, we will go immediately to worship in rental facilities, with small groups led by volunteers.

For six months leading up to the public launch date, we will have monthly “preview” services. A preview service is a regular worship service at which everyone is “practicing” for when we invite the general public on launch day. However, after the first one to three preview services (once the roughest edges are knocked off) we will begin inviting personal friends and doing some early advertising. With each service we will build momentum by increasing our connected outreach efforts.

Everyone who attends a preview service is then invited to a “comeback event” two weeks later. These six comeback events are social events at the pastor’s house, at a park, and in other locations. Here the vision for the church is cast, community ties are built, and all attendees are invited to help put on the next preview service.

All this leads to a large marketing push combined with a big invitation program for the launch day, which kicks off regular full operation of the church with weekly public worship gatherings and small group meetings.

[This is from the Launch Plan for New Way Church in Austin, TX. Yesterday: Church Systems. Next time: Street to Kitchen.]

[This is from the Launch Plan for New Way Church in Austin, TX. Yesterday: why Mac Frazier. Tomorrow: Crowd to Core.]

Austin is also a young city. The average age for New Way Church’s initial target area (a four mile radius centered on the Gateway mall), for instance, is 36. The most significant demographic age group in this area are the “survivor” generation of 28- to 48-year-olds, which makes up 39% of the population here; the U.S. average for this group overall is only 29%. Austin overall is culturally very young. The presence of the University of Texas in the center of the city, with its 50,000 students, has a significant cultural impact, as do the multiple annual music festivals that draw international crowds.

The U.S. Lifestyle group (from a system of 6 demographic groups and 50 subgroups used by church psychographic research company, Percept) most significantly present in the area is the “Young and Coming” group. Young and Coming households represent 52% of this area’s population, 16% of which are of the Rising Potential Professionals subgroup; for comparison, the U.S. average for the Young and Coming group is only 15%. This area is also a highly educated one, with twice as many college graduates per capita than in the general U.S. population.

Given the large amount of transplant growth, the overrepresentation of people on the cusp of starting families, and the overall atmosphere of intellectual and philosophical experimentation, Austin represents fertile ground for church planting. In particular, this place has what has sometimes been termed “New Church Friendly Demographics”; it has been on the unofficial church planting “to watch” lists of a number of church growth thinkers in the General Church for years.

An additional reason for planting in Austin is that it is a good match not only for the New Church, but for this particular New Church planter, the Rev. Mac Frazier. When doing outreach work, it is important to find a good match between the target culture and the background of the founding pastor. In this case, Mac is coming from a background in high-tech entrepreneurship, and is intimately familiar with the culture, worldview and lifestyle of tech workers and managers that make up a significant percentage of the target demographic in Austin. Austin is a high-tech town; Dell is headquartered there and IBM has a major presence there, among other high-tech employers in the area. During the height of the tech boom there were regular commuter flights between Austin and the Silicon Valley—dubbed the “nerd bird”—because the growing cadre of web workers and growing Internet millionaires preferred the more laid back and progressive lifestyle of Austin.

[This is excerpted from the Launch Plan for New Way Church in Austin, TX. Go to yesterday's except for an explanation of why we need More Societies (i.e. New Church congregations). Tomorrow: why Mac Frazier would make a good church planter for this plan.]

Most systems, (social networks, commercial markets, entertainment media, etc.) naturally tend toward a long-tail distribution pattern. Only when there are artificial barriers to distribution (limited shelf space, for instance) does this natural distribution pattern get truncated in a way that favors the investment in “blockbusters”, “best sellers”, “top 40 hits”, etc. The church world is no different. Church is essentially a local cultural phenomenon, and is becoming more so. These days, with new generations growing up with greatly increased expectations with regard to choice, variety, and customization brought on by the long tail effect of digital distribution, we will see a move away from megachurches akin to the de-urbanization trends caused when a society moves from industrialism to post-industrialism.

Going forward, young people will choose faith communities the way they would like to ideally choose restaurants: “fresh, seasonal, local”. In church terms, this means they will prefer congregations that are vibrant (as evidenced by an active engagement with the world), culturally relevant (and aware of current trends and issues), and distinctly local. Denominational affiliation has been increasingly meaningless, or even detrimental to church growth in the Christian world, and there is little reason to expect it will be different for Swedenborgian churches.

For these reasons, the optimal growth strategy for an organization like the General Church is to invest so as to maximize not the size of congregations, but the overall number of culturally varied congregations. Provided that such congregations are large enough to be self-sufficient, the portion of the Lord’s kingdom that the General Church represents will grow best when spread across as many different cultural niches as possible. This strategy also diversifies risk.

Other advantages of pursuing a multiple-congregation growth strategy include: diversification of risk and increased cultural variety within the body of the General Church. In fact, it is this last that is potentially most beneficial.

The General Church is a stuck system, largely due to cultural inertia. We can strive to change the established culture of the existing groups in order to grow them, or we can add new groups that have no pre-existing church culture. The latter takes less effort (and does less damage) than the former, yet still adds significantly to the overall cultural transformation of the body of the worldwide movement.

Consider also, this, from Heaven and Hell:

It is worth noting that the more members there are in a single community and the more united they are in action, the more perfect is their human form. This is because variety arranged in a heavenly form makes perfection, as explained above in 56; and variety occurs where there are many individuals.

Every community in heaven is growing in numbers daily, and the more it grows, the more perfect it becomes. In this way, not only is the community perfected, but heaven in general is perfected as well, since the communities constitute heaven.

Since heaven is perfected by its numerical growth, we can see how mistaken people are who believe that heaven will be closed to prevent overcrowding. Actually, it is just the reverse. It will never be closed, and its ever increasing fullness makes it more perfect. So angels long for nothing more than to have new angel guests arrive there. (HH 71)

Earlier in the same work, it says this:

Variety in worship of the Lord from the variety of good in different societies is not harmful, but beneficial, for the perfection of heaven is therefrom. …Unity, that it may be perfect, must be formed from variety. Every whole exists from various parts, since a whole without constituents is not anything; it has no form, and therefore no quality. But when a whole exists from various parts, and the various parts are in a perfect form, in which each attaches itself like a congenial friend to another in series, then the quality is perfect. So heaven is a whole from various parts arranged in a most perfect form, for the heavenly form is the most perfect of all forms. That this is the ground of all perfection is evident from the nature of all beauty, agreeableness and delight, by which the senses and the mind are affected; for these qualities spring and flow from no other source than the concert and harmony of many concordant and congenial parts, either coexisting in order or following in order, and never from a whole without many parts. From this is the saying that variety gives delight; and the nature of variety, as is known, is what determines the delight. From all this it can be seen as in a mirror how perfection comes from variety even in heaven. For from the things that exist in the natural world the things of the spiritual world can be seen as in a mirror. (HH 56)

From this it is perfectly clear how each society of the church can be further perfected through the addition of new members. It then does not take much of a stretch to see how the church as a whole will be greatly improved through the addition of new congregations.

[This continues the serialization of the Launch Plan for New Way Church in Austin, TX. It continues the Rationale section, started last week. Tomorrow: why Austin, Texas.]

• The world and the church will mutually benefit from the creation of more New Church societies, and in fact will benefit more from many medium-sized congregations than from just a few large ones;
• Austin, Texas is rich soil for church launching in general and for the New Church in particular;
• The Rev. Glenn McKinley Frazier (a.k.a. “Mac”) is the right person to lead this project;
• Church launching, using the crowd-to-core model of church growth, has advantages over church planting, using the core-to-crowd approach;
• Many church starts jeopardize their ability to be financially independent, and thus their ability to grow, by getting into real estate ownership too soon;
• Effective evangelism involves honest marketing, and effective marketing strives to demonstrate how a brand is the leader in its own unique category, not a latecomer in an already established category; and
• Best practices from the old Christian church growth world are a useful starting point for making projections and setting benchmarks, but it must be remembered that our unique theology may prove to invalidate some of them as we go forward.

The following is additional rationale behind some of these assumptions.

[Excerpted from the New Way Church Launch Plan. Yesterday we wrapped up the first section ("The Point"), and today we begin the second section, "Rationale". Next week we continue with the Rationale section, with "More Societies", "Austin, Texas", "Mac Frazier", "Church Systems", and "Crowd to Core". If this is interesting to you, please post a comment. And if you know someone else who might have something useful to contribute, invite them into the conversation, too!]

Locally, the people who worship at this church will have the reputation among their neighbors as being a friendly, service-oriented community that would be sorely missed if it were to some day disappear. Through great preaching, effective service programs and a strong network of small groups, lives will be regularly transformed by the healing teachings of the New Church and by means of the loving followers of the Lord God Jesus Christ as He reveals Himself in His Second Coming.

We will have grown and thrived and reproduced, having not only daughter churches, but also granddaughter and great granddaughter churches, including several additional congregations in the greater Austin area, congregations in other parts of the country in places like New York, Florida and California, and congregations in other countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. Not every church launch will have been a success, but with a willingness to learn from mistakes and a faith in the Lord’s desire to see His kingdom more fully established on earth, we will have directly or indirectly launched 20 viable, self-sufficient congregations, each with at least one hundred and fifty members.

The main campus of the original Austin congregation will have become a center for church launch training, working in partnership with the Academy of the New Church Theological School to prepare ministers and other church launch personnel to continue the work of creating new venues for sharing the good news of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. By this time, the Austin church launching model will have evolved through trial, error, prayer and repentance to be the main church launch model used by the New Church worldwide.

[This is a description of what I visualize when I imagine the distant future impact of following the Launch Plan for a New Church presence in Austin. This flows from the Aspirational Goal posted yesterday. Tomorrow: An overview of the plan's Rationale.]

[Exerpted from the Launch Plan for a church in Austin, TX. Yesterday was Our Mantra. Tomorrow: Vision.]