Acts 29 Network

Heritage

Founded in 1998 by David Nicholas of Spanish River Church in Florida together with Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, as a network to assess, fund and coach church planters. In 2012 its leadership and offices moved to Dallas under Matt Chandler of The Village Church, and the network reorganized and internationalized; it has continued under subsequent presidents. The name is the joke and the thesis: the book of Acts has twenty-eight chapters, and the church's planting work is the unwritten twenty-ninth. Member churches remain fully independent and very often belong to denominations as well — many are also Southern Baptist.

Theological family

Confessionally Reformed and evangelical: the network's doctrinal distinctives include salvation by grace alone, a complementarian view of pastoral office, and a missionary reading of the local church. It is a theological network, not a style — its churches range from liturgical to loud.

Who decides what

A network, insistently: Acts 29 assesses and admits churches and planters, provides coaching and funds, and can remove members — but it governs no church, owns nothing local, and disclaims the word denomination on principle.

What a first-time visitor would find

Whatever the local church has built — the network prescribes no worship form. Common threads in practice: substantial expository preaching and an unhurried seriousness about membership.

What it has always cared about

Rigorous assessment of planters (a corrective to church planting by sheer zeal); theological depth in young churches; planting churches that plant churches.

Its gift to the wider church

Acts 29 professionalized church planting for a generation — its assessment-and-coaching model, treating planters as callings to be tested rather than volunteers to be cheered, has been borrowed far beyond its membership.

Commonly confused with

With a denomination, which it is not — members keep their own affiliations; and with the broader "young, restless, Reformed" movement, of which it was an engine but not the whole.

Range of views inside it

Member churches vary in denomination, worship style and country; the doctrinal distinctives are the fixed core.

Where Acts 29 Network churches are on the map

1 Acts 29 Network congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.

• Oklahoma — 1

Moments this body was part of

• 1982 — The network era of church planting

  From the 1980s onward the energy of American church founding moved into relational networks: Vineyard organized under John Wimber from 1982, Acts 29 formed in 1998 to plant churches across denominational lines, and city after city saw congregations of different traditions fund and coach one another's plants. Networks ask a different question than denominations did — not "whose are you?" but "who are you helping start?"

  Church planting became the ecumenism of practice: a Baptist church coaching a Presbyterian plant sharing a building with a Pentecostal congregation is now ordinary.