A recommended Southern Baptist church planting method is at the center of the $1.3-million Baptist General Convention of Texas scandal which recently spawned a liability suit.

The Southern Baptist Convention apparently believes it has good reasons for investing heavily in Church planting efforts. Church planting is, wrote C.Peter Wagner, "the most effective evangelistic strategy under heaven." In theory, it generates rapid denominational growth by establishing new churches, which are then filled mainly by new members.

The approach at the focus of an Oct. 31, 2006, investigation by the BGCT was developed by Otto Arango, who filed the liability suit mentioned above. It is called "Church Planting Training Centers."

According to SBC North American Mission Board literature, the "Church Planting Training Centers." technique involves using Arango's twelve-volume set of materials at church-based centers to train individuals to become church-planting laymen and pastors.

The laymen and pastors thus trained form groups in their own homes, and those groups go on to become self-sustaining, free-standing churches.

Apparently, the pastors of those new churches then make use of Arango's training materials to train others to repeat the process, thus quickly proliferating Southern Baptist Churches through target populations where there are few.

The process, according to the BGCT investigation, didn't work and it isn't clear how the money allocated to it was spent. In a May 25, 2007 story headlined No lawsuits planned; too costly & complex, lawyer suggests, the Texas Baptist Standard wrote:

Last year, a five-month independent investigation uncovered evidence that 98 percent of the 258 new churches reported by three church planters in the Rio Grande Valley between 1999 and 2005 no longer exist, and some never existed -- except on paper. Those churches received more than $1.3 million from the BGCT. The investigative team faulted the BGCT Executive Board staff for poor oversight, uneven management, failure to abide by internal guidelines and misplaced trust.

Broad questions have also been raised about other Baptist church planting programs. For example, in may of 2007 the Georgia Christian Index reported:

One critic stated, 'I would predict that if someone were to take the thousands of church plants that have been reported to trustees and try to pinpoint them on a map, that maybe 5 to 15 percent of them could be found and it would be impossible to locate the others.'

That's in keeping with the findings of the Texas study, although the Georgia Christian Index was writing about Church Planting Movement claims made by the International Mission Board.

The IMB Global Research Department said that "the number of churches increased globally by 21.5 percent in 2005 from 111,286 to 135, 252 for a net gain of 23, 966 churches. Since 2001 the number of reported churches has more than doubled, reflecting a five-year average annual growth rate of 18.1 percent."

The Georgia Christian Index answers, not with audited or otherwise authoritatively verified data, but an assertion that the IMB should be trusted:

However, the criticism seems to be invalid simply because the leadership of the IMB insists upon a meticulous and precise accounting of churches in their Annual Statistical Reports.

Logically, all of this is small comfort to church professionals who are involved in church planting and to church members trying to understand how well their offering money is being spent.