Why We Are Becoming a Network of Networks
For years, our vision has been simple to say and much harder to accomplish: We want to plant 1000 churches in our generation. We want to see churches planting churches, again and again, until the gospel reaches places and people far beyond what any one church could reach on its own.
That vision has shaped the Summit Collaborative from the beginning. We are a network of churches committed to identifying leaders through relationships, supporting each other like family, and championing multiplication. Those are not simply phrases we say. They describe the kind of movement we want to become. It is our church planting strategy.
And by God’s grace, the strategy is working. The movement is growing.
But growth also creates an important question: What happens when a church planting network becomes so large that the very things that made it effective begin to become harder to preserve?
We want pastors to actually know one another. We want church planters sitting around tables where they are known personally, not simply participating in a large training program. We want all our churches engaged and developing leaders from within their own congregations rather than assuming “someone else will do it.” And we want multiplication to continue accelerating rather than eventually becoming limited by the capacity of one central organization.
That means, in order to keep the movement moving, we have to get smaller as we get larger.
That conviction is leading us toward the next chapter of our story: not simply becoming a larger church planting network, but becoming a network of church planting networks.
The network is the engine of multiplication. We call those networks Collaboratives.
And the strategy behind creating more of them is something we call true multiplication.
Why We Multiply
Organizations usually think about growth by asking a straightforward question: How can we get bigger?
But bigger is not always the same thing as greater impact.
One framework that helped shape our thinking came from the Stanford Social Innovation Review article What’s Your Endgame? The basic premise is that organizations pursuing large-scale impact should first decide what role they ultimately need to play. Sometimes the answer is to continue expanding the original organization. Sometimes it is to make an idea available for others to use. Sometimes it is to replicate the model through other organizations. The right strategy depends on the endgame.
For us, that question became: If we really want to see church planting multiply for generations, does the Summit Collaborative simply need to become larger and larger?
We do not think so.
We could keep adding churches, adding staff, building a larger central budget, creating more regional structures, and managing more church planters from one organization. There are ministry organizations that scale effectively that way.
But eventually that model runs against some of the things we value most.
Family becomes harder when the family becomes enormous. Leadership development becomes increasingly centralized and it is easier to trust someone else is doing the work. And counterintuitively, as an organization grows, often a smaller and smaller number of people consider themselves owners of the mission.
There is another way.
True multiplication grows by giving away ownership and leadership.
Instead of asking how one Collaborative can plant every future church, we want to help mature groups of churches develop the leadership, relationships, resources, and experience necessary to become Collaboratives themselves.
That involves more risk. It is inherently less controlled. A new Collaborative will not simply be a regional office executing instructions from headquarters. That’s not ownership. It will have real leaders making real decisions in its own context.
And we believe that is precisely where multiplication can accelerate. New leaders bring ideas the original leadership never would have developed. New groups of churches develop relationships we could never manufacture centrally. New Collaboratives can identify leaders we would never meet, meaningfully strengthen churches one organization couldn't, and plant churches in places one organization could never adequately serve.
The goal is not uniformity. The goal is shared DNA with distributed ownership.
That is what makes this different from a franchise. In a franchise, leadership may be distributed, but the central organization still owns the playbook and controls its execution. It is also different from a regional model, where leaders in different locations ultimately work for the same central organization.
True multiplication says something more difficult: at the right time, we are willing to give leadership away.
A healthy Collaborative should eventually be capable of producing another healthy Collaborative.
That is true multiplication.
Our Shared Identity: What Makes Us One Movement?
Giving away ownership does not mean giving away identity.
In fact, true multiplication requires stronger clarity about what must remain shared.
If every new Collaborative must operate from a detailed central playbook, we have not really multiplied—we have simply expanded. But if there is no meaningful theological, philosophical, or missional alignment, then we are not actually one movement.
So our approach is built around what we think of as minimum shared understandings: enough clarity to preserve our DNA without attempting to centrally control every decision. The strategy document describes those boundaries as missional, relational, financial, theological, and organizational.
At the church level, we express that identity very specifically:
A Collaborative Church affirms the Statement of Collaboration, the Philosophy of Ministry, the Lead Pastor Profile and engages in the Collaborative Church Planting Strategy.
Those documents help answer four important questions: What do we believe together? How do we think about ministry? What kind of pastors are we trying to develop? And how are our churches actually going to work together to plant more churches?
Our philosophy is organized around four convictions—Gospel, Balance, Growth, and Multiplication—and those convictions help provide common ministry DNA across different churches and, eventually, different Collaboratives.
Our strategy is equally important. Every Collaborative continues to do the same basic work: identify leaders through relationships, support each other like family, and champion multiplication.
The expression may change from Collaborative to Collaborative. The relationships will certainly be different. Leadership will be contextual. But the DNA remains recognizable.
That is how we can be genuinely decentralized while still being genuinely together.
How a New Collaborative Starts
We believe this will all happen over time, as God calls new leaders and starts new movements. A new Collaborative does not begin just because a leader decides to launch a new branch of our organization.
It begins much more organically—with a church that plants another church.
Our language for this is a Family.
The strategy puts it simply: Anytime a Collaborative Church has planted a church, they are starting a family. A Family is a smaller group of churches within a Collaborative, usually formed as one church plants churches and begins caring for those churches relationally.
That distinction matters. We do not want to manufacture new Collaboratives on an organizational chart. We will not allow tribes or friends to declare themselves a Collaborative. Networks primarily centered on support and care are good. Collaboratives must emerge from actual multiplication.
A sending church plants. Relationships deepen. Those churches begin supporting one another. They develop more leaders. They plant again. Over time, the Family begins taking increasing responsibility for the three things every Collaborative does: identifying, supporting, and championing.
The progression is gradual.
A parent church may initially have one or two potential planters in its pipeline while its lead pastor provides much of the leadership. As the Family grows toward three to five churches, the leadership pipeline should grow with it. Someone begins helping coordinate the Family, learns the Collaborative assessment and development system, helps create relational environments for the pastors, and begins traveling with and contributing to an existing Collaborative’s church planting cohort.
Eventually, the question becomes less, “Could this group become its own Collaborative?” and more, “Is God already creating one here?”
Our current framework looks for several indicators before a Family is ready to become an independent Collaborative:
A leadership pipeline: roughly 10 future planters being developed within the churches.
A genuine family of churches: approximately 15–20 committed churches with complementary leaders and gifts.
Demonstrated multiplication: the ability and intention to plant roughly two to three churches each year, with capacity to grow from there.
Dedicated leadership: an Anchor Lead Pastor who serves as a visionary convener and a trained Collaborative Director who serves as a strategic developer, supported by other leaders who bring relational, pastoral, and organizational strengths.
Sustainable resources: an initial endowment contributed from multiple sources, along with sustainable recurring funding generated through the participating churches' shared financial commitment.
Those numbers are not intended to turn multiplication into a formula. They are indicators of maturity and movement. Before a new Collaborative becomes independent, there should be enough leadership to lead it, enough churches to function as a real family, enough future planters to make multiplication sustainable, and enough financial capacity to support a director, assessments, gatherings, and meaningful investment in new churches.
Most importantly, there should already be a multiplication story taking place. We are not trying to divide healthy Collaboratives for organizational convenience. We want to recognize moments when God has raised up a leader, gathered a distinct family of churches around that leadership, and created enough multiplication momentum for that group to take greater ownership.
At that point, an existing Collaborative does something unusual for a growing organization:
It gives life to a new movement.
Independent, But Not Alone
When a Family becomes a Collaborative, independence does not mean separation.
Each Collaborative will eventually have its own leadership, its own budget, its own church planting cohort, its own assessment process, and its own rhythms for supporting its churches. But the Collaboratives remain relationally connected as part of the same movement.
Think of it less like multiple campuses of the same organization and more like an extended family. Within one Collaborative, pastors and planters function like immediate family. Across Collaboratives, they become extended family.
We continue gathering together. Collaborative Directors remain in regular relationship. Lead pastors and directors maintain intentional alignment. And the larger movement periodically comes together so that churches remember we are participating in something larger than our individual congregation—or even our individual Collaborative.
There is also an expectation built into the model that multiplication continues.
The goal of a Collaborative is to plant roughly two to ten churches per year. When a Collaborative grows beyond that level, the question should not simply become, How do we build a bigger Collaborative?
Instead, we begin asking again: Where is the next Family? Who are the leaders God is raising up? Could another Collaborative be born from this one?
The working strategy envisions healthy Collaboratives intentionally looking for opportunities to multiply themselves over time rather than accumulating churches indefinitely.
That changes the definition of success.
Success is not having the largest network.
Success is becoming the kind of network that can produce another network—and then rejoicing when that new Collaborative eventually does the same.
A Movement That Keeps Giving Itself Away
Church planting itself is built on this idea.
Healthy churches send people they love. They send leaders they have developed. They send money they could have used themselves. They give away strength because they believe the Kingdom grows through sending.
We believe our church planting networks should operate the same way. If our churches are multiplying but our organization is always consolidating, we eventually create a contradiction between our message and our model.
So we want to practice multiplication organizationally too. We want churches that plant churches. Families that produce Collaboratives. Collaboratives that produce more Collaboratives.
And a movement that becomes stronger not by concentrating more leadership at the center, but by continually raising up leaders and giving meaningful leadership away.
And if God is gracious, the result will be far more than one successful church planting network.
Want to Be Part of the Movement?
Maybe you are sensing a call to plant a church.
Maybe you have already planted and are realizing that you do not want to do the next season alone.
Or maybe you lead an established church that is beginning to develop future planters and you want to belong to a larger family committed to church growth and to church multiplication.
If you are preparing to plant, our Church Planting Cohort works with leaders who are ready to plant and connects planters into a sending or sponsor church so that they enter church planting as part of a family rather than on their own.
Learn about planting with the Collaborative
If you are already leading a church and want to explore becoming part of the Collaborative, the process starts with getting to know one another, developing leaders together, building relationships with other pastors, and discovering whether our shared commitment to identification, family, and multiplication fits your church.
Explore becoming a Collaborative Church
Because the next chapter of this movement will not be written by making one organization bigger. It will be written as more churches, more leaders, more Families, and eventually more Collaboratives take ownership of the mission and send again.
