What Is a Church Planting Movement?
A church planting movement is the rapid, multiplying spread of disciples and churches, where churches start churches until the growth is counted in generations instead of in one large congregation. The missionary David Garrison, who studied movements around the world, defined it as a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment. It describes something God does, not a program we run.
That’s the short answer. The longer answer is worth having, because “church planting movement” is one of those phrases people use to mean very different things. Some use it for a church that starts a second campus. Others use it for a denomination’s plan to open fifty churches in a decade. Neither of those is what the term was coined to describe. It points at something rarer and harder to manufacture: a chain reaction of churches starting churches that keeps going after anyone stops organizing it.
Where the Term Comes From
The phrase was made specific by David Garrison, a missionary and researcher who spent years studying places where the gospel spread fast and reproduced on its own. He was not writing theory. He was reporting what he found in India, China, Africa, and elsewhere, and looking for what those movements had in common.
His definition is the one most people still quote:
Garrison's definition
A church planting movement is a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment.
Every word in that sentence is doing work. Rapid means the reproduction is fast enough that you cannot keep up by adding trained professionals. Multiplication means churches are not just being added one at a time, they are reproducing. Indigenous means the churches are local, led by local believers, not run by outsiders who fly in. And churches planting churches is the engine: the new churches are not the end of the line, they start the next ones. When that happens across a people group or a segment of a city, you have a movement rather than a single growing congregation.
Notice what the definition does not say. It says nothing about a big building, a well-known preacher, or a large budget. Garrison found the opposite. The movements he studied ran on ordinary believers meeting in homes.
What Makes It a Movement and Not Just Growth
A church can grow for years and never start a movement. The difference is not size. It is whether the growth reproduces.
Picture two churches. The first is excellent at addition. It reaches new people, baptizes them, and gathers them in, and over ten years it grows from one hundred to five hundred. The second church is smaller, but it trains its people to make disciples who make disciples, and to start new churches that do the same. After ten years it might have planted churches that planted churches, three and four generations deep, with fewer people in any one room but far more reach.
That gap is the whole subject. It is the difference between addition and multiplication in ministry, and it is why movements are measured in generations of churches rather than in attendance. A first-generation church start is good. A fourth-generation church, a church your church’s church’s church started, is evidence that something is reproducing without you holding it up. That is what the power of multiplication actually means when you take it past the slogan.
A church planting movement is not a bigger church. It is churches that reproduce, counted in generations rather than seats.
TAKE THE NEXT STEP
You can define a movement perfectly and still be trying to multiply alone.
A movement is worked out with other practitioners, not studied by yourself. Find people learning to multiply disciples and churches today, inside the CoVo Multipliers community.
The Ten Elements Garrison Found in Every Movement
When Garrison compared the movements he studied, he found ten things present in every single one. He called them universal elements, meaning he did not find a movement missing any of them:
- Prayer. Extraordinary, not occasional. The movements were soaked in it.
- Abundant gospel sowing. The good news was shared widely, not carefully rationed.
- Intentional church planting. Someone actually set out to start churches, on purpose.
- Biblical authority. The Bible, not a personality or a program, was the authority.
- Local leadership. Local believers led, from early on.
- Lay leadership. Ordinary people led the churches, not only paid professionals.
- House churches. The churches were small and met in homes.
- Churches planting churches. The reproduction ran through the churches themselves.
- Rapid reproduction. New churches started quickly, often within months.
- Healthy churches. The churches were worshiping, discipling, ministering, and evangelizing communities, not just meetings.
Garrison also noticed other traits in most of the movements, though not every one: worship in the heart language, believers folded in fast, a real price paid for following Jesus. But the ten above were the common floor.
A list like this can read as a recipe, as if you could assemble the ten parts and produce a movement on schedule. That is exactly the wrong way to hold it. These are descriptions of what God did in places where his people prayed, sowed widely, and got out of the way, not levers you pull to guarantee a result.
A movement is not a technique
You cannot engineer a church planting movement, and anyone who promises to is selling something. Multiplication is a work of God’s Spirit, and it comes with a price, including opposition and suffering. What you can do is stop doing the things that make multiplication impossible, and start reproducing the patterns Jesus gave. God gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6-7). The ten elements describe the soil, not the harvest.
CPM or DMM: Is There a Difference?
If you have read much on this, you have run into two acronyms, CPM (church planting movement) and DMM (disciple making movement), and wondered whether they are the same thing.
They point at the same reality from two angles. CPM keeps the emphasis on churches planting churches. DMM keeps it on disciples making disciples. In practice they run together: disciples who make disciples end up gathering into churches, and healthy churches keep making disciples. Most practitioners use the terms almost interchangeably, and the key characteristics of a DMM describe the same fast, indigenous, multiplying, obedient reality this page does. If you want the disciple-first angle, read that one alongside this. The word you choose matters less than whether real reproduction is happening.
Why This Matters for an Ordinary Christian
It is easy to file “church planting movement” under things that happen to other people, in other countries, at a scale you will never touch. That is a mistake, for one simple reason: movements are built out of the most ordinary parts imaginable.
Look back at Garrison’s ten elements. Prayer. Sharing the gospel. Ordinary believers leading small churches in homes. Helping the people you reach reach others. None of that requires a platform or a title. It requires reproducing, in the few people in front of you, the same life and obedience you received, until they do it with someone else. That is the whole argument of how to multiply disciples and churches: multiplication is the fruit of reproducing the patterns of Jesus in others, not a strategy you bolt on.
Jesus built his own plan this way. He poured his life into twelve people, trained them by taking them with him, and sent them to do the same:
2 Timothy 2:2And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.
That is four generations in one sentence: Paul, Timothy, reliable people, others. A church planting movement is what it looks like when that pattern keeps going and does not stop with you. History gives us glimpses of it at scale, from the early church to Paul’s two years in Ephesus that reached a whole region.
You do not start a movement by aiming at a movement. You start by making one disciple who can make another, and by refusing to become the bottleneck. If you are earlier in that journey, begin further back, with what it means for a simple church to form and then start another one. The movement, if God gives it, grows out of that.
Frequently asked questions
What is a church planting movement in simple terms?
It is churches starting churches so quickly and so many generations deep that the growth reproduces on its own, spreading through a people group or an area. David Garrison defined it as a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment. The key is reproduction, not the size of any one church.
Is a CPM the same as a DMM?
Nearly. A church planting movement (CPM) emphasizes churches planting churches; a disciple making movement (DMM) emphasizes disciples making disciples. They describe the same fast, local, multiplying, obedient reality from two angles, and most people use the terms interchangeably. See the key characteristics of a DMM for the disciple-first version.
Can you start a church planting movement?
Not by technique. Multiplication is a work of God’s Spirit, and it usually comes with a cost. What you can do is pray, share the gospel widely, disciple people who will disciple others, keep churches small and reproducible, and get out of the way so local believers lead. Those are the conditions God has used, described in Garrison’s ten universal elements. God gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6-7).
What are Garrison’s ten universal elements of a CPM?
Prayer, abundant gospel sowing, intentional church planting, biblical authority, local leadership, lay leadership, house churches, churches planting churches, rapid reproduction, and healthy churches. Garrison found all ten in every movement he studied. They describe the soil movements grew in, not a formula that guarantees one.