Mission Igniter: A Church-Planting Incubator

by Jeff Finley 

An effort to launch churches in southern Michigan has quickly grown into a multistate church-planting incubator with new ministries hatching from Alaska to Ohio.

“Mission Igniter exists to help start new ministries, new churches for groups of people that are not currently churched or within the reach of existing churches,” Executive Director Dustin Weber said in an interview with Brett Heintzman on a new episode of “The Light + Life Podcast.” “We believe there are not enough churches. There’s not a church for everyone, and we’re working to help start new churches in those areas.”

The incubator is “resourcing apostolic leaders and existing churches to multiply and start new works in new areas,” Weber said. “We’re igniting new churches for all kinds of people. We’re here to provide the support that every church planter needs in starting new work.”

The Dearborn (Michigan) Free Methodist Church started the effort in 2017 with the Detroit metropolitan area in mind.

“Quickly, within a year, we spread that out across southern Michigan, northern Ohio and northern Indiana,” Weber said.

Last year, Mission Igniter’s reach extended far beyond its native Southern Michigan Conference turf through a partnership with the Pacific Northwest Conference. More recent partnerships have emerged with the North Central and Oregon conferences. The incubator has resourced or partnered with nearly 25 new ministries.

At the beginning, Weber said, Mission Igniter focused on helping the Southern Michigan Conference “develop the systems necessary to see church multiplication happen.” The conference had a vision to start 10 new churches in three years.

After three years, the incubator began providing resources to other conferences and helping them to establish new systems for multiplication.

Training Individuals and Churches

Erick Ewaskowitz, the director of coaching and training, said that Mission Igniter discovered Dynamic Church Planting International training material that another Wesleyan Holiness denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, used with a 90% success rate. The approach includes two core trainings.

“The first is what’s called ‘Church-Planting Essentials,’” said Ewaskowitz who explained that program “is really geared toward individual leaders who have a call to start a new work.” Another training, “Churches Planting Churches,” is designed “for churches that are looking to start a daughter church.”

Mission Igniter has customized some of the training, Ewaskowitz said, “but what we love about it is the principles translate across different models, and it’s highly practical.”

Each training participant must develop an initial plan to present at the end of the training.

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“We’re looking for people that really have an evangelistic heart to reach people who are far from God.”

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“We’ve seen about 60 different leaders go through this training in the last few years, and some new churches and initiatives birthed as a result,” Ewaskowitz said. “Not only do we want to multiply more leaders and churches, we want to multiply more coaches and trainers, and so we’ve built certification programs where we’ll do a two-day training to help coaches get online to walk with church planters in their conference. We can certify trainers to do these trainings in-house.”

Research reveals “that the three most critical factors for healthy successful church planting are assessment, coaching and training,” Ewaskowitz said. “We feel that it’s important that we invest heavily in those three areas.”

Weber said the planting process typically begins with “an individual who just simply has seen a need: ‘So there’s a group of people in my community that nobody is reaching…’”

Some church-planting programs are designed for people with charismatic personalities who try to start an attractional church.

“God’s done a lot through that, and we celebrate that, but we also recognize that there are many different kinds of models of churches that are needed out there to reach different kinds of people,” Ewaskowitz said.

Mission Igniter’s church plants are model-specific.

“The experiences God has gifted somebody can inform the model that’s going to be used in reaching a new group of people,” Weber said.

“If someone’s wanting to start a dinner church or a microchurch network, there are different things we’re going to be looking for,” Ewaskowitz said. “We’re looking for people that really have an evangelistic heart to reach people who are far from God. We’re looking for people who are willing to take some risks. They’re problem-solvers.”

Mission Igniter understands the importance of each planter being surrounded by a team, and new research backs that approach.

“We don’t plant alone,” Ewaskowitz said. “I think it’s unhealthy, and it’s unbiblical, so let’s find leaders who can gather a team, lead, serve and build something new as a team.”

Coaching Potential Planters

Weber noted that Ewaskowitz has developed a 12-unit coaching program to help a person develop a plan for what a new church would look like.

“In most of the conferences we work in, once somebody’s completed the plan development and coaching and has gone through the initial assessment work, we have a team of people that sit down. They look at and analyze the plan,” Weber said. “They’re making the judgment: ‘Is this the right person to do this plan?’ And if so, it’s approved in this region. That’s how they start the pathway in the Free Methodist Church as a church-planting project.”

Mission Igniter facilitates a matching grant program to help planters get started. As planters implement their plans, they go through two to three years of coaching with a Mission Igniter coach.

“Every plan will have to have adjustments,” Weber said. “Nothing ever goes exactly as we foresee, but that’s the important part of having somebody to resource you as you continue to adjust your plan, and we work with them in the Free Methodist network to help them progress on to be a fellowship or on to a society.”

Success Stories

Mission Igniter has helped innovative church plants such as Evergreen Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which Pastor Derik Heumann started with a vision for Generation Z and younger millennials. Evergreen doesn’t follow a typical church-planting model. The church is one of the incubator’s fastest reproducing churches with new leaders (mostly under age 35) emerging and a new group launching nearly every other month.

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“They started as a very small group, and now they have quite a handful of missional communities…”

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“They’re primarily a network of missional communities that gather one Sunday afternoon a month for their extended worship service and dinner time. All their folks are gathering in homes weekly,” Weber said. “Almost all of their congregation are also in discipleship bands weekly for very intensive discipleship in that way. They started as a very small group, and now they have quite a handful of missional communities that usually are anywhere from 10 to 15 to up to 25 in size that gather weekly, and they’ve been able to also reach a handful of different communities not just in the city of Ann Arbor, but all throughout that region. They’re really becoming a regional ministry.”

Mission Igniter also helped Pastor Paul Kim launch Pungsunghan Abundant Life Church in Tacoma, Washington, that recently celebrated one year of ministry. The church primarily focused on reaching Korean immigrants at first, but now it reaches people from different ethnicities and backgrounds.

“Within just a few months, he’s already doing two gatherings — one in Korean and then one that’s bilingual,” Ewaskowitz said. “The vision has shifted to being more of a multicultural, multiethnic church.”

Ewaskowitz also mentioned that his colleague’s wife, Pastor Megan Weber, leads the Jiran Collective ministry among Arab refugees in the Detroit-Dearborn area.

“Megan’s four years in, and she’s serving in a predominantly Muslim context,” Ewaskowitz said. “We know that the culture is becoming less receptive to the church. That’s more and more so with the people group that Megan’s working with, and she’s done such a great job in building bridges and building community and has had many opportunities to share the gospel. … This last year, there’s a young woman that she had been working with who came to faith in Christ.”

Click here for more of the conversation. For additional information or to get connected with a Mission Igniter coach, visit missionigniter.org or call 833-709-2251.+