Church Planting

Boston is often described as secular, but these stories from churches in the area will stir your faith and expand your vision for what God is doing in the city.

In the last 10 years, pastors have faced unprecedented challenges in shepherding their congregations. How did pastors in Boston hold up under the pressure?

There are about 250 Black churches in Boston facing multiple challenges. To leverage their collective strength, almost a dozen of them came together to build relationships for the betterment of the community.

Churches have experienced plenty of change and faced much upheaval over the last 10 years. If you could take a snapshot of your church before and after that period, what would it look like? Would you see any big structural changes? How would the leadership of your church have changed? What about the congregation? 

How has the church landscape in Boston changed over the last ten years? EGC’s Applied Research team analyzes the data from before-and-after snapshots of a group of newer churches between 2014 and 2024.

The Boston Church Directory may be used for a variety of scholarly, relational, and spiritual purposes.

Want to know where to plant a church in Boston? You might consider Boston’s newest or soon-to-be-built residential growth sites. We’ll take a look at eight neighborhoods where growth is—or soon will be—taking place, based on public and private development plans. 

Rev. Ralph Kee, animator of the Greater Boston Church Planting Collaborative, has been giving a lot of thought to this idea: What may be the Church’s dreams for Boston for the next few decades? What should be the Church’s priorities? Where are the Church’s growth edges? In this article, Ralph offers his own five basic ideas, his five dreams about church planting for Boston’s future.

The City of Boston has released “Imagine Boston 2030,” a comprehensive vision to prepare for an expected population surge by the city’s 400th anniversary in 2030. Can the church articulate a similar vision for what the Kingdom of God could look like in Boston 13 years from now?

New England’s Book of Acts is a 2007 publication of the Emmanuel Gospel Center that captures the stories of how God has been growing his Church among many people groups and ethnic groups in New England.

Our research on new church development in Greater Boston yielded general information with a special focus on women in leadership. The hope is that this study can become a source of “mainstreaming” gender parity discourse within the church, as part of an overall discussion of the practical needs of church planters in the areas of leadership and ministry development.

God’s intent is that everyone living in Greater Boston be enthusiastically and holistically engaged in a community of vibrant Christian faith. The best way to make that happen right now, in 2012, is by church planting—apostolic-led church planting. That is the story of the Book of Acts and it is the story of Christian history ever since.