Church Replanting: A Viable Strategy for Revitalizing Alliance Churches in the 21st Century

This project seeks to construct a theoretical model of church replanting which merges the two related fields of church renewal and church planting. The challenge of a replant strategy is to close a church suffering from chronic decline and reinvest its resources in the launching of a new congregation. Rather than employing incremental change dynamics characteristic of conventional church renewal efforts, a replanting project utilizes rapid, radical redesign. Healthy, reproducing churches which are capable of producing more and better disciples represents the ultimate goal of this process.

The research conducted synthesizes biblical principles of renewal, the best ideas of church revitalization specialists, guidelines from church planting experts and field-tested strategies of replanting practitioners. The desired outcome of this dissertation is a viable strategy which outlines a step-by-step process for replanting which can be implemented by denominational leaders and replanting pastors, particularly among Christian and Missionary Alliance churches in the Pacific Northwest District.