Partnering to Plant Churches in Europe: Challenges, Advantages and Practical Tips
This article is based on a recent conversation with Erik Nielsen, associate pastor of First International Baptist Church (FIBC) in Copenhagen. Through several partnerships, FIBC has been involved in church planting in Copenhagen and in Alicante, Spain. Their story offers a helpful picture of what church partnerships can look like.
Church planting can feel like an overwhelming task.
Where do you find a church planter? How do you fund the work? Who provides mentoring and pastoral support? What happens when the church planter comes from a different church tradition?
One practical answer is partnership.
Rather than assuming that one local church must do everything itself, churches can work together to identify, equip, support and send church planters. In Europe, this kind of partnership can open doors that might otherwise stay closed.
From church growth to church multiplication
When Erik began serving at FIBC, church planting was not part of his ministry vision. His understanding of church growth focused mainly on increasing the size and maturity of a local congregation. But through the International Baptist Convention's growing emphasis on church planting, he began to see church health differently.
A healthy organism doesn't simply grow larger. It reproduces.
The same principle applies to churches. A healthy, mature church should grow not only in attendance, ministries and discipleship. It should also develop the desire and the capacity to reproduce.
So FIBC began looking not only for opportunities to plant a church itself, but also for opportunities to come alongside others who were planting.
That distinction matters. A church doesn't have to be the "parent church" that sends out its own members and launches a church from scratch. It can also be a partner church, contributing people, finances, mentoring, prayer, leadership, practical ministry or other resources.
The first opportunity came through a missionary couple who moved to Copenhagen with the International Mission Board, with a heart to reach Danes. Years later, the Lord opened the door for FIBC to support a former elder who moved to Alicante, Spain, to join a couple who had recently arrived there from IBC Bonn in Germany.
The advantages of partnering with other churches
Here are some of Erik's reflections on what partnership makes possible.
1. Partnership makes church planting possible for smaller churches
One of the biggest advantages is simple: you don't have to do everything yourself.
Churches may hesitate to consider church planting because they believe they lack the resources. They may not have a full-time church planter, enough money to support a new congregation, or enough members to send a team.
Partnership changes the equation. Several churches can each contribute a different piece of the work. One church may provide financial support, another a mentor. Another may send members, and another may provide training or ministry resources.
Together, churches can accomplish something that none of them could easily accomplish alone.
2. Partnership brings different strengths to the church plant
The Alicante church plant is a particularly useful example.
IBC Bonn had a direct relationship with Matthias and Mira, who were moving from Germany to Spain. The church had already been thinking about church planting and had visited Alicante to explore whether a church could be established there.
Then another relationship unexpectedly became significant. Arno and Ilona, previously connected to FIBC Copenhagen, were looking for a place to keep serving the Lord after Arno retired from his career. Through existing relationships, they connected with Matthias and Mira and became deeply involved in the church plant.
The result was not simply one church sending a planter. It became a partnership involving IBC Bonn, FIBC Copenhagen, Aquila Initiative and the church-planting team in Alicante, with different people bringing different experience and responsibilities.
That diversity can become a strength.
3. Partnership provides additional mentoring and accountability
Church planting can be isolating. Planters face decisions about leadership, discipleship, worship, finances, membership, constitutions, family life and countless practical details.
A partner church can provide someone who has already walked through some of those challenges.
In the Alicante partnership, Erik served as Arno's ministry mentor. They met monthly to discuss the progress of the church plant, emerging problems, decisions facing the leadership, and areas where Arno needed encouragement or counsel.
The mentoring was not merely theoretical. It connected training with what was actually happening on the ground, and gave the planter access to experience and wisdom he might not otherwise have had.
4. Partnership can provide resources beyond finances
Financial support is valuable, but partnership can involve much more. FIBC's involvement in Alicante included:
Regular prayer for the church plant
Financial support through the church budget
Personal mentoring
Visits to the church plant
Training for the church plant's music team
Seminars on marriage and parenting
Encouragement and pastoral counsel
Opportunities for other FIBC members to take part
This is an important reminder: a church's contribution to a church plant isn't measured only in money and people. Time, relationships, experience, prayer, training and encouragement can be just as significant.
5. Partnership can connect people who would otherwise never meet
Some church-planting opportunities emerge through deliberate planning. Others emerge through relationships and circumstances no one could have predicted.
Alicante is an example. A church member moves to another country. A feasibility trip takes place. Someone reads a blog post. A former church member happens to be looking for a place to serve after retirement. Existing relationships connect people across countries.
Suddenly, several churches find themselves part of the same church plant.
This doesn't remove the need for intentionality. But it does mean churches should stay attentive to opportunities that emerge through their existing networks.
The challenges of church-planting partnerships
Partnership is valuable, but it is not automatically easy. Bringing several churches together also means bringing together different cultures, expectations, structures and theological traditions. Here are some of Erik's thoughts on what to watch for.
1. Partner churches won't always agree on everything
Even churches within the same denomination or network can have meaningful differences.
IBC Bonn and FIBC are both part of the International Baptist Convention and share a broadly Baptist framework. That provided a helpful foundation, but it did not make them identical. They had different:
Doctrinal statements
Terminology
Leadership structures
Budgeting processes
Membership practices
Expectations about church life
For example, the churches understood membership and baptism differently.
Those differences could not simply be ignored. They had to be discussed, and a decision had to be made about whether the partnership could continue. Were the differences deal-breakers? Or were they opportunities to work through things together, and to let the new church make its own decisions about where it would land on these issues?
2. Partnerships require theological clarity
One practical response was a partnership agreement with a theological foundation. It gave the churches a way to put expectations on paper and to identify where they did, and did not, agree.
The goal was not to make the two churches identical. A church planted through a partnership doesn't need to become an exact replica of either supporting church, and it almost certainly won't. The new congregation will naturally carry influences from both partners while developing its own identity.
The goal is enough shared understanding for the churches to work together faithfully.
3. Some differences are negotiable; others are not
This may be one of the most important practical lessons from the Alicante partnership: churches exploring a partnership should identify their non-negotiables early.
Some differences can be discussed, accommodated or worked through. Others reveal such fundamentally different convictions that partnership would create an unhealthy situation. Those need to surface before the partnership moves too far forward.
It may be better to decide that a partnership isn't right than to enter one that creates confusion or conflict for the church planter.
4. Trust is essential
Theological agreement is important, but partnership also requires relational trust. You have to trust that the people involved are genuinely seeking the Lord's purposes rather than pursuing personal agendas.
This matters most when one church asks its members to follow another leader. In FIBC's relationship with New Song Church in Copenhagen, for example, FIBC encouraged some of its own members to join the new church. That required a significant degree of trust in Christian Roth as a fellow shepherd.
A church is not simply moving volunteers from one ministry to another. It is entrusting people to another leader. That requires confidence in the leader's character, theology, ministry philosophy and commitment to the gospel.
5. Different partnerships require different levels of involvement
FIBC's partnerships show why there is no single template.
Its relationship with New Song in Copenhagen was close and frequent. Christian had been connected with FIBC, some FIBC members became involved in New Song, and Erik served on an interim elder team while Christian developed local leadership.
Alicante was different. FIBC did not send a group of its own members to form the church. Its main involvement was Erik's mentoring relationship with Arno, supported by financial giving, prayer, occasional visits, seminars and the participation of other church members.
The structure followed the relationship, the ministry need and the demands of geography.
Practical tips for churches considering partnership
So what can your church actually do if you are considering partnering with another church to plant in Europe?
1. Develop a multiplication mindset before an opportunity arrives
FIBC's experience suggests the partnership worked partly because the church was already thinking about multiplication. The congregation had been taught to see church planting as part of church health, so when opportunities appeared, it was ready to consider them.
Don't wait for someone to bring your church a church-planting proposal. Talk about multiplication now. Pray about it. Teach your congregation about it. Help people understand that discipleship includes preparing believers to serve beyond the walls of their current church.
2. Look for opportunities within your existing relationships
Church-planting opportunities may be closer than you think. Ask:
Where are former members now serving?
Where are the missionaries connected to our church?
Where are our members moving?
Are there churches in other European cities that need support?
Are there church planters in our network who need mentoring?
Are there believers preparing to move who want to serve?
Are there places where a new congregation could be started?
The Alicante partnership grew out of relationships that already existed. Relationships can become pathways for mission.
3. Don't assume every partnership needs to look the same
One partnership might involve sending twenty people. Another might involve one mentor meeting monthly with a planter. Another might mainly be financial support and prayer. Others might involve shared leadership for a season, or hosting ministry events and providing training.
Shape the partnership around the actual needs of the church plant, rather than trying to reproduce a predetermined model.
4. Put expectations in writing
Even when relationships are strong, clarity matters. A written partnership agreement can answer questions such as:
What is the theological basis for the partnership?
Who provides financial support?
Who is responsible for the church planter?
How will the planter be mentored?
Who makes major decisions during the planting phase?
What happens when the new church becomes autonomous?
How will disagreements be handled?
What are the expectations on membership, baptism, leadership and doctrine?
What happens if the partnership needs to end?
Putting these questions on the table early can prevent significant confusion later.
5. Identify non-negotiables early
Don't postpone difficult theological or ecclesiological questions. Talk about them before people become deeply invested.
The aim isn't to eliminate every difference. It's to work out which differences can be accommodated and which would make the partnership unworkable. Healthy partnerships are not built on avoiding difficult conversations. They are built on having those conversations honestly and charitably.
6. Build relational trust between leaders
Spend time together before committing to a partnership. Talk and pray together. Visit one another's churches and observe how they function. Discuss ministry philosophy, get to know one another's families, and ask hard questions.
Trust is much easier to build before a crisis than during one.
7. Give the church planter room to lead
A partner church should provide a framework in which the new church can become healthy, not try to create a clone of itself. The goal is not to reproduce the supporting church's exact structure, vocabulary or practices. It is to help establish a healthy church that can faithfully pursue its mission in its own context.
That requires support without unnecessary control.
8. Provide practical mentoring, not just academic training
Training matters, but church planters need opportunities to apply what they are learning. The Aquila Theological Institute apprenticeship, discussed in the podcast, pairs each apprentice with a ministry mentor, an academic mentor and a network mentor, with the emphasis on growing competency in context.
That means asking not only, What does the planter know? but also:
How is he leading?
How is he making disciples?
How is he caring for people?
How is he handling conflict?
How is he developing leaders?
How is he applying theological convictions to real church life?
Church planting is learned not only in classrooms, but through faithful ministry in real situations.
9. Be willing to send your best
One of the strongest challenges from the conversation was the willingness to send people out.
Churches can spend years discipling and developing gifted people, then become reluctant to release them because they have become so valuable to the existing congregation. But multiplication requires sending. A church that develops people for ministry should also be ready to release them for kingdom work.
The question is not simply, How can we keep our best people? It is, How can we faithfully equip people to serve wherever God sends them?
10. Keep the church involved
Partnership becomes far more meaningful when the congregation knows what is happening:
Share updates.
Pray for the church plant publicly.
Invite church planters to speak.
Include the work in missions reports.
Send teams or individuals when appropriate.
Celebrate milestones.
When the congregation sees the church plant as part of its own mission, partnership becomes more than a line in the budget. It becomes part of the church's identity.
Churches plant churches
At the heart of Aquila's work is a simple conviction: churches plant churches. Networks, conventions, organisations and training institutions can support that work, but local churches remain central to making disciples and multiplying healthy congregations.
And churches don't have to do it alone.
Church planting doesn't always begin with a large team, a large budget or a perfectly developed strategy. Sometimes it begins with a church that has learned to ask a simple question:
"Where is God already working, and how can we join him?"
Then, when the opportunity appears, the church is ready to pray, partner, send and support, and to watch a new church take root.
Equipping leaders in your own church
The Aquila Theological Institute helps local churches develop leaders for ministry and church planting without sending them away. Your church chooses an apprentice from within the congregation, and they train in context, supported by a ministry mentor, an academic mentor and a network mentor.
If your church is thinking about multiplication, or about a partnership like the ones in this story, we'd love to talk.
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