REGIONAL Church Planting Model in Denver

In Denver, Colorado, a strategic church planting model has been developed and implemented, where God has led a church planter to target a whole city or even a cluster of towns.  Harry Olsen, Missions Door Church Planting Specialist in the Rocky Mountain States, refers to this model as the “Matrix Church Birthing Model.”  Soma Christou Communities is the new Matrix Church Plant serving in the Denver Metroplex.

Soma Christou has been defined as “one church plant beginning multiple congregations throughout the neighborhoods of the Denver Metroplex”.  Within these combined communities, or congregations, they have seen upwards of twenty professions of faith.  Soma Christou is a combination of these multiple neighborhood congregations made up of all ages and ethnicities including black, white, Latino, and Asians…all coming together as one congregation 5 times annually.

Harry Olsen and Paul Fischer (the co-church planter of Soma Christou Communities) both lead two different neighborhood congregations each week.  They are preparing and training leaders in each of these groups.  These trained leaders are then able to lead their own congregation in the future.  Leaders of each group meet together every Thursday night for prayer, leadership training and message preparation. The goal is seeing all of Soma Christou Communities move forward as one, until the day that each of them is ready to stand alone and reproduce as a matrix church.

 This church planting model:

•  allows either one theologically trained planter or a small planting team to plant multiple churches almost simultaneously and continuously.
• allows for the equipping of lay people to lead in the early stages of their church plant until their own manpower and funding is sufficient to enable them to stand alone and to call their own full time planter/pastor to lead them into the future. 
•  is heavy on leadership training and mentoring. 
• is very low overhead using only one rented or borrowed church building monthly or quarterly with most of the rest of the ministry beginning in homes.
• uses combined resources to pay one planter, and to pay for one occasional facility. 
• uses initiative and innovations from different people in the various neighborhood congregations coming together and spear heading special ministries, out reaches, and events as one full functioning church.

 Harry Olsen has plans to use this type of Matrix church plant in several smaller cities in the Rockies during the next couple of years.  He is also trying to find just the right church planter to begin this model in the greater Salt Lake City area of Utah known as the Wasatch front. Harry believes that twenty first century dynamics, guided by Biblical principles, has led to this type of planting approach in other planting movements in the US, as well as other parts of the world.