More Money Than Men: The NAMB Church Planting Problem

I am a church planter. In 2008, I moved my family to Cincinnati and planted Christ the King Church through the North American Mission Board’s (NAMB) Nehemiah Project—a church planting funding initiative tied to Southern Seminary (SBTS). NAMB made my church possible, and I am genuinely grateful for that. My church exists because of NAMB, SBTS, the Nehemiah Project, and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). I was greatly encouraged and fully supported as a church planter during those volatile early years of uncertainty.

This experience has also given me an insider’s perspective for nearly two decades into how the church planting engine works. I’ve seen both incredible fruit and significant carnage. I believe Southern Baptists deserve a clear picture of what their Cooperative Program dollars are actually doing.

Here is my thesis: NAMB has more money than qualified men to spend it on. That single problem, and the institutional pressures it generates, explains much of what has gone wrong with Southern Baptist church planting over the last fifteen years.

The Math Nobody Talks About

Consider what it costs to fund a church planter. When I first started, my support package from the Nehemiah project, my state convention, and local association was about $3,000 per month, plus health insurance, and lasted for over three years. Using rough numbers, that’s an investment of over $108,000 to plant one healthy church. If the numbers were always that straightforward and simple, no one would argue that’s a worthwhile investment to establish an SBC church that could last generations.

Now consider NAMB’s budget. The Annie Armstrong Easter Offering alone generates roughly $70 million annually, representing about half of NAMB’s total budgeted revenue.¹ Add in Cooperative Program (CP) receipts and NAMB is working with approximately $140–150 million per year.²

That staggering sum creates an interesting dilemma: what if NAMB has more money to spend than qualified church planters to spend it on? When money accumulates faster than qualified leaders, the pressure to spend it anyway becomes nearly irresistible.

Churches give generously to NAMB under the reasonable assumption that more dollars produce more churches. The logic seems intuitive, but it is wrong. Money cannot manufacture qualified pastors. If you have $10 million earmarked for church planting but no qualified planters to send, that $10 million will not plant a single healthy congregation. The irreplaceable ingredient is a godly, qualified man with the gifts, character, and calling to shepherd a flock. No budget line item substitutes for that. Apart from a work of the Spirit, all the money in the world will not plant one healthy church. Simply put, money can’t buy calling, qualification or gifting.

Another problem is that qualified church planters do not scale on demand. Leadership development is slow, organic, and resistant to institutional acceleration. But money does scale, and when money accumulates and compounds, it creates enormous pressure to justify its existence by being spent. In short, the church planting world has a leadership bottleneck that no amount of money can fix.

And yet, Southern Baptists are eager to fulfill the Great Commission, and we’re convinced that church planting is the best and most faithful way to do it. That presents us with a difficult choice. The first option is to lower the bar for church planters, which means taking risks on men who may not be qualified or ready to plant. This option is more pragmatic. Sometimes the gamble will pay off, and men will rise to the challenge to successfully plant a healthy church. It also enjoys the good optics of reporting to the convention a larger number of churches planted. This option has hidden costs that are rarely talked about: many of these men burn out or disqualify themselves, and their churches fail.

The second option is to maintain a high standard for church planters, which means fewer men will meet it, leading to fewer churches being planted. This option is more faithful, in my view, but the optics aren’t as good. Southern Baptists want their Cooperative Program dollars producing results; no one wants to report declining numbers of churches planted to the convention, even if those few churches have a higher likelihood of success and longevity.

As I will show, it seems NAMB has taken the first option because the money is there and the convention is eager for positive results, but I have seen too much pastoral carnage to look the other way.

The Church Planting Gold Rush

The 2010s were a church planting gold rush in evangelicalism, and NAMB was sitting on the mother lode. The launch of the Send Network, a marketing initiative targeting the top twenty-five urban centers in North America, turned NAMB into the most talked-about name in church planting circles. I once heard someone say, “NAMB will give money to anyone.” That reputation had consequences. Church planters from a variety of networks began pursuing dual affiliation with the SBC. They did not do this out of any particular theological or ecclesiological loyalty to the convention, but because that’s where they could get funding. NAMB had money to give. These planters would retain their primary network identity while dually affiliating with the SBC, sometimes ditching the SBC as soon as the money ran out. It was, in the parlance of the moment, a NASCAR sponsorship phenomenon: put the logo on the car and collect the check.

The gold rush also created awkward incentive structures within existing churches. For years, the traditional pathway to becoming a senior pastor looked something like this: a young man with gifts and calling would come on staff as a youth pastor or worship pastor, learn under a seasoned elder, develop over time, and eventually rise to senior pastoral responsibility as he matured. It was slow and often frustrating for ambitious young men. But it worked.

The church planting boom short-circuited all of that. Why wait years for an uncertain ministry promotion when you could plant a church today? NAMB and the broader church planting culture promised aspiring young leaders the title of lead pastor immediately, multiple years of guaranteed funding, little accountability to an established eldership, and the adoring accolades of a grateful convention that would celebrate you as a hero doing the tough “trench work” of planting. For a young man eager to be recognized, eager to lead, and eager to prove himself, that is a nearly irresistible offer. And many took it.

Seminaries fed the same machine. Brick and mortar seminaries need tuition revenue to keep the lights on, which creates an institutional incentive to enroll students that are unlikely to be successful in vocational ministry. Their MA or MDiv diploma then functions as a valid credential for church planting assessment. It can be emotionally difficult to tell a man “no” to church planting when he has worked for years and made financial sacrifices to go to seminary to get to that interview, especially when you are sitting on a pile of cash and your annual report to the convention is measured in churches planted. There’s a lot of pressure to advance a man through the pipeline, cut him a check, and pray it works out.

What the Money Actually Buys

I have been on the receiving end of NAMB’s generosity from the beginning. When my wife and I were commissioned through the Nehemiah Project, NAMB flew what appeared to be hundreds of church planters and their spouses, possibly more than a thousand, out to Denver for the ceremony. It was an all expenses paid trip, including hotel rooms, travel, and meals. It was an impressive operation.

At the time, I thought, “they’re going out of their way to make this a special event,” and we appreciated being treated with such kindness. I especially remember one detail in particular—the name badges we all wore had our names engraved on them. That was a nice touch, but I couldn’t help but wonder what those cost to produce, especially in light of the other expenses. I thought perhaps they were willing to indulge a few luxuries to mark such a momentous occasion, but I later noticed NAMB had a way of spending a lot of money on other events as well.

For example, my wife and I were invited to go to the SBC annual convention in New Orleans, all expenses paid, with the expectation that I would sit for a video interview about church planting while we were there. I also went to a training event at NAMB Headquarters in Alpharetta, GA, again, on NAMB’s dime. Attendees were told to choose an item from the merch store to take as a gift. I chose a nice, NAMB jacket. On another occasion, my wife and I were invited to attend an all expenses paid, exclusive fundraiser in New York City with select, high profile pastors who had deep pockets. Our job was to mingle and be the face of urban church planting. I was honored to have been invited and express my appreciation for how NAMB made our ministry possible.

NAMB also blessed church planters in other, unexpected ways. I got an email once telling me to go to the online merch store and choose any item as a gift. This time I picked out a nice, Ogio laptop backpack which I still use to this day, ten years later. I was also notified that NAMB wanted to help church planters establish retirement accounts, so I would be receiving a $1,000 gift deposited into my Guidestone account.

Since we were in one of NAMB’s targeted SEND cities, all the church planter families in my city were treated to an all expenses paid trip to Great Wolf Lodge. At every turn, we were treated like royalty. We went to nice dinners in fancy restaurants and tickets to Cincinnati Reds ballgames. Church planting is a difficult ministry and we were blown away by the generosity shown to us by Southern Baptists through NAMB.

The Carnage

I need to speak plainly here, because the human cost of bad church planting is real and serious. I entered the church planting world in 2008, and in the years since, I’ve witnessed a great deal of carnage. If a zealous church planter isn’t able to build a self-sustaining church after a faithful effort, that’s unfortunate and possibly painful for those involved, but reasonable Christians understand that not every plant will succeed. My concern is for the unacceptably large number of church plants that have failed due to scandal surrounding the church planter. Let me give you some examples.

I visited a NAMB church plant in Cincinnati that first year before we launched ours. The pastor had no theological training. Rather than preaching that week, the pastor played a video of a Steven Furtick sermon, part of a pre-packaged multi-week series that freed him from the burdens of preparing a message. He was well funded and had institutional backing. He resigned after a few years.

Another NAMB church planter in my city of Cincinnati stepped down from ministry because his marriage was falling apart. He and his wife eventually divorced. During this time, he drifted away from orthodoxy and embraced a kind of mystical universalism. It is difficult to calculate the spiritual harm caused by these situations. I counseled with one woman from his church shortly after this happened. She said, “I sat under his preaching. I learned the gospel from him. If he’s a fraud, what do I do with what he taught me?”

One friend of mine planted a NAMB church in Massachusetts. My church financially supported him. When his church plant was unsuccessful, he ended up denying the Christian faith altogether, becoming an outspoken atheist who is hostile to Christ.

And then there is the church planting failure I find most disturbing. A man visited my church one Sunday who said he’d recently moved his family to Cincinnati to plant a church. I’d heard his name from some pastor friends who had red flags about him. He’d been assessed by two different church planting networks and was turned down—but he was approved by NAMB! He formed a core group with a few families and was building momentum. A year or so later, I received word that he shut it all down. Why? He had left his wife, abandoned his children and his church to come out publicly as a practicing homosexual. He now works for a homosexual-affirming congregation in my city.

Most of these churches were planted with NAMB resources and support. Their eventual collapse brought reproach on the name of Christ, not to mention the Southern Baptist Convention. And every soul who joined these churches trusted these pastors to shepherd them. When church plants fail in such devastating ways, the spiritual toll is incalculable to the body of Christ.

This is the cost of lowering the bar. It’s not an abstract statistical failure. It’s real people enduring real harm—these people sat under the preaching of these pastors, submitting to their leadership, and found themselves wounded, disillusioned, and often skeptical of the church for years afterward.

Incentives and Assessments

As stories of church planting problems have begun to circulate more broadly, the goodwill is beginning to fade. The gold rush of the 2000s and 2010s seems to have slowed down, as people experienced firsthand the pain of failed church plants and disqualified pastors.

Given NAMB’s mixed track record, not to mention the spiritual devastation left in its wake, two inevitable questions came to mind. First, how did so many men who crashed out in church planting pass their assessments? And second, given NAMB’s reputation for generosity and easy assessments, what sort of unintentional incentives did that generosity create?

When considered together, these two questions answer themselves. Let me explain. Good church planting assessments should filter out aspiring planters that should not be sent and funded. Assessments are not rubber stamps. They should rigorously verify and discern, as best as possible, whether the candidate truly possesses the gifting and calling to plant. Therefore, in effect, the best assessments lead to fewer churches being planted because the proper filters have been applied.

But given NAMB’s impressive war chest, not to mention its mandate from the convention to plant more churches, the incentives prioritize quantity over quality. NAMB justifies its resource allocation by reporting a high total of churches planted, and no one will raise the alarm if those churches are led by unqualified men. There’s no metric for faithfulness. Churches led by unqualified pastors are all reported the same way.

When rigorous assessments filter out men who aren’t good candidates for planting, fewer churches are planted, leading to a surplus of unspent church planting dollars. That money needs to go somewhere, and NAMB needs to somehow connect those expenditures to church planting.

Perhaps that can explain why NAMB is employing and deploying an army of coaches, strategists, mobilizers, and consultants. It would seem that NAMB has created a monster through easy money and weak assessments, then hired itself to kill it.

Financial Transparency Found Wanting

When pastors’ marriages are failing, their churches are crumbling, and many are disqualifying themselves altogether, it seems NAMB’s response is to deploy additional resources for coaching and consulting. That’s a noble goal, but the lack of transparency in the details about these special NAMB jobs is concerning. One could cynically argue that NAMB created the problem by funding men who were not qualified to plant, then solved the problem by funding men to fix the same problem.

NAMB employs a number of people with ambiguous job titles, such as “mobilizer” or “strategist,” ostensibly to provide on the ground support for church planters. Again, that’s a noble goal, provided they are good at their jobs and provide a real benefit for pastors. At this point, it’s not clear to me that this is the case. What is also unclear is their actual job descriptions and salary ranges. That opacity is itself a problem for an institution funded by the cooperative giving of ordinary Baptist churches.

An example from February 2026 is instructive. Vance Pitman, who served as president of NAMB’s Send Network, stepped down from that role. According to Baptist Press, Pitman announced that he sensed God leading him “into a different season of leadership.” In his new contracted role as “national mobilizer,” he will, per the announcement, continue “encouraging and influencing pastors, planters and ministry partners across North America.” The change, NAMB noted, “allows Pitman to launch a preaching, coaching and consulting ministry.”³

3. NAMB Staff, “Pitman Moves to National Mobilizer Role with NAMB’s Send Network,” Baptist Press, February 19, 2026.

Read that carefully. This is a contracted position, meaning he is employed by NAMB, whose output is described as encouragement, influence, and the launch of a personal ministry. That looks like a golden parachute dressed in the language of calling. Of course, this may be perfectly benign. Pitman is a gifted man who has done genuine good. But without financial transparency, we cannot evaluate it. What does it mean to mobilize, encourage, and influence pastors? How is success measured? We cannot know what it costs, how it is justified, or how many similar arrangements exist throughout the organization.

Infantrymen and Special Forces

As stated above, the issue at hand is an asymmetry between money and men. Every pastor is an infantryman for Christ (2 Tim. 2:3-4)—faithful, trained, obedient to orders, willing to sacrifice. Every church planter is a pastor, but not all pastors should be church planters. Church planters are like special forces in the ministry world. They have a very particular assignment: to start a church where one did not exist before, which requires an additional and distinct skill set beyond what it takes to shepherd an existing congregation. Not every faithful pastor is a church planter. Not every gifted young man with seminary training is a church planter. The selection process for special forces in the military is brutal precisely because the stakes are high and the mission is specialized. The selection process for NAMB-funded church planters has, by all appearances, been considerably more accommodating.

Years ago, I was in a meeting of local pastors and an SBC Associational leader called a Director of Missions, where we were discussing church planting goals. Our Director of Missions asked, “How many churches do we want to trust God to plant in the next ten years?” One pastor suggested ten. The next pastor suggested twenty. Not to be outdone, a third suggested fifty. In situations like this, it’s easy to assume the larger the number, the greater the faith. There were only two of us present at that meeting who were actively planting churches and had seen the carnage. We looked at each other in astonishment. Somewhat sheepishly, I raised my hand and suggested, “In the next ten years, I recommend we trust God to plant five healthy churches led by well-qualified pastors.”

That was not the most popular perspective shared that day, but I stand by it. Fewer churches. Better churches. And far less carnage.

What Is NAMB to Do?

I want to be fair here, because there is a real structural bind.

NAMB cannot manufacture qualified men. If the convention is clamoring for more churches and the pipeline of genuinely qualified planters is limited, NAMB faces a genuine dilemma. It can (1) raise the bar, plant fewer churches, and be criticized for underperforming against its mandate, or (2) it can lower the bar, plant more churches, generate impressive-sounding numbers for the annual meeting, and obscure the downstream damage behind the noise of activity.

Over the last fifteen years or so, it has chosen the latter, and the incentives make that choice nearly inevitable. The best way for NAMB to market itself to the convention as a success is to tout the raw number of churches planted. The health of those churches, and of the pastors who lead them, is, as far as the marketing goes, largely irrelevant. As long as nobody is asking hard questions about what happened to the church planted in Cincinnati or Indianapolis or Memphis three, five, or ten years ago, the machine keeps running.

But the machine is not, on net, producing what it claims to produce. Its output is a mixed bag. I know of many outstanding churches NAMB has planted in the last decade and a half. And yet, alongside those successes, there are too many failures, compromises, and disasters to ignore, while only the success stories are presented to the people funding the whole operation.

Conclusion

I am not calling on churches to stop giving to NAMB. I am not dismissing the real good the institution has done. NAMB planted my church. I would not exist as a pastor without it, and for that I will always be grateful.

But the current system is not working. And the case for reform rests on two simple convictions:

• First, NAMB should set a high standard for church planters and refuse to deviate from it. In my view, it is time to reevaluate the “more churches” mantra in favor of a “fewer and better” approach. A smaller number of healthy, thriving, doctrinally sound congregations does more for the kingdom than a larger number of failing, compromised, or simply mediocre ones. The people in those failing churches bear the cost, and they deserve better stewardship from the institution that sent their pastor.
• Second, financial transparency is absolutely essential. An institution operating on $147 million of cooperative giving owes the churches that fund it a full accounting of where that money goes—including staff salaries, consulting arrangements, event costs, and all the rest. Without that transparency, the convention is flying blind. We have enough anecdotal evidence, at this point, to warrant serious concern. A formal audit would either confirm that concern or put it to rest. Either outcome would be valuable.

I’m confident that NAMB is capable of being the world’s premier church planting organization. It already is, in some ways, but only in terms of sheer volume. The day NAMB begins measuring itself by the long-term faithfulness and ecclesiological health of its plants—rather than by the raw count it can report at the annual meeting—is the day it will begin producing something worthy of the investment the convention has entrusted to it.

Until then, the money will keep flowing, the numbers will keep climbing, and somewhere in a city near you, a church planter who should never have been funded will be preaching to a congregation that deserves better.