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No denomination invests more in church planting than the Southern Baptist Convention. America's largest Protestant body wants to double its number of congregations in the next 20 years, to 100,000. Richard Harris says they have been starting four churches a day, but they need to increase that number to eight or ten.

These are not your father's Southern Baptist churches. I attended an "opportunity tour" in San Francisco's East Bay. Upwards of 60 church leaders from throughout the country boarded vans to see where the East Bay Baptist Association needed help starting churches. My tour began in the Canal District of San Rafael, where a recent seminary graduate, Marian Engelland, is trying to establish a church among Guatemalan immigrants in low-income apartments. From there we hopped across the bay to San Pablo, where a huge African American preacher named Port Wilburn leads a team trying to re-launch a struggling inner-city church and re-envision it to reach a new middle-class housing development. Then we had lunch with 18 Chinese pastors in Oakland's Chinatown, where the SBC wants to start a church among restaurant workers who typically work Sunday mornings and need to meet late at night. Finally, we traveled to Fremont, where another recent seminary graduate reaches out to the 60,000 Afghan immigrants in the area.

Sixty percent of the SBC's new churches focus on ethnic minorities. "They are quite cutting edge," Wheaton College's Scott Moreau says of SBC church planters. "You can plant a church that looks like a mosque." Still, other East Bay tours looked at plans to start churches in elite Anglo neighborhoods and one aiming to become a regional seeker-sensitive church at Jack London Square, a cultural gathering spot near downtown Oakland.

Lyman Alexander, the East Bay's director of missions, says they hope to add ten new churches a year and double the East Bay association. "Money is the biggest hindrance, because it is so expensive to live here," Alexander says. "People come and look at the cost of living, and they say, 'I'll starve.' God definitely has to call them here."

In years past, evangelism didn't necessarily motivate church planting. Southern Baptists, for example, planted churches as they moved out of the South, taking the comforts of home with them. Methodists started churches in the suburbs that attracted their upwardly mobile church members who migrated out of the inner city. Such churches still get planted, but their number has declined along with denominational loyalty.

Today's church plants often target immigrants, which means adjusting church traditions to diverse ethnic cultures. "Any denomination that has an aggressive church-planting program and doesn't have a bias toward the white community will be largely ethnic," says David Ripley, who leads ethnic ministries at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, Illinois. "If we are challenging people to reach their neighbors, the reality is that the neighborhood is changing." As an example, he notes that 25 languages are spoken at Wheaton North High School, formerly dominated by WASP students.

So-called emerging churches also plant churches, since the kind of ministry they espouse doesn't exist in traditional bodies. "Looking at churches today, are they likely to reach the next generation for Christ?" asks Eddie Gibbs of Fuller Theological Seminary. "So many of our churches are the product of Christendom: Open the door and let them come in."

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September 2007, Vol. 51, No. 9