MPC is a made-in-Canada, well-tested, successful system to start new churches. In terms of results, we have tested our plan with four churches in different communities. The Kainos team has been involved in hundreds of unchurched people attending church for the first time ever or the first time in years. Over 60% of them stayed. Many have met the Saviour for the first time and more than a dozen are now leaders in their congregations. Using the system we call Mass Personal Contact we can start a church that is completely self-supporting with an attendance of about 100 people any given week. And we can do it in any major city in Canada. The astounding fact is that what has often taken five or more years to achieve can be achieved in less than half a year.

Simply put, the plan is built on the premise that it is more important to fund the right kind of outreach than it is to fund the church planting pastor. When we, on behalf of a new church, conduct a massive outreach effort, we identify the few thousand unchurched families in the community on which they must concentrate. These are the households that have shown themselves to be responsive. With proper church work, a few hundred of these unchurched people immediately become a part of the new church. They are the ripest part of the white fields Jesus taught about. As participants in that church, they give sufficient money for the church to thrive and continue to harvest as the fields continue to ripen.

Through a gentle process, we filter the community households to find the most responsive people. We don’t invite them to a stadium, a picnic or a concert. After sending weekly print communications explaining the new church, we invite them to a church service. It is very predictable how many will respond—hundreds! It is also very predictable as to how many will stay—50-75%! But the results are cut in half when we work with an existing church—even a one-year-old church. People like something new better than something old—even one year old. That is why what we do is ideally suited to starting churches.

One of the factors in the success of the MPC approach is that, as contradictory as it may seem, the system works because we have learned how to manage failure. A little more than half our attempts to talk to somebody receive no response on that occasion. We keep trying until we actually talk to a mature person in about 90% of the households in the target area. This tenacity is very expensive in terms of time. But we find it worthwhile. Once we actually talk to a decision maker in the household and explain what we are doing, we eliminate a large number of people who tell us they already have a church connection. We also eliminate all the people who are not ready to receive communication from a church. We do find that with a new church 10-15% agree to hear the story. We use friends of the church serving as home missionaries to do the contacting. We send each family five pieces of mail one week apart.

After the mail is sent the core group of the church takes over. They actually invite these thousands of people to attend the first service of the church. A certain proportion of people respond positively and begin attending the church immediately. Others require more patience. When the church patiently continues to communicate, after many months and even years people come out to a service. We don’t give up until they tell us they are not interested. Along the way many come to Christ and His church.

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