Ohio United Methodists aim to plant 100 churches

Key Points:

• Bishop Hee-Soo Jung of the East and West Ohio conferences has set a goal of 100 new faith communities planted by 2029.
• Brad Aycock, executive director of Fresh Starts and New Beginnings for the conferences, travels the state to recruit church planters and support ideas for  fresh expressions of church.
• The Ohio conferences have committed $500,000 per year to support new ministries, Aycock said.

Brad Aycock is driving somewhere in Ohio. He is on the hunt.

“Today I’m in a district recruiting (church) planters,” said Aycock, executive director of Fresh Starts and New Beginnings for the East and West Ohio conferences. “We go to every district across the whole state, set up shop and listen to their ideas and try to support next steps for new ministries.”

On Sept. 10, Bishop Hee-Soo Jung called for the launch of 100 new faith communities in Ohio by 2029.

“My feeling is we’re not simply looking backward with nostalgia or holding on, but we are leaning forward … toward the divine future where we can do vital ministry,” Jung said. “Our goal is not maintenance, but mission driven.”

It isn’t strictly a numbers game, Aycock said. “Our goal is to reach as many young, diverse people as we can. … We know that if we hit that, that can help reach a tipping point for Ohio and beyond.”

The United Methodist Church in the U.S. had just under 4 million members as of 2024, down from 4.2 million the previous year, according to data from the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration. There are about 7.3 million members in Africa, the Philippines and Europe.

The U.S. church lost more than 7,600 congregations from 2019 to 2023, largely over theological differences — primarily around whether the denomination should allow LGBTQ people to get married in church and serve in leadership positions, including being pastors.

In Ohio, there were 1,647 United Methodist churches at the end of 2022, according to the finance agency. Currently, there are 990.

On Aycock’s travels around the state, he assesses ideas for new church starts and pathways to implementing them.

“If someone shows up today and shares their idea, we would determine is this high-risk, high-investment model versus low-risk, low-investment model? If it’s high-risk, high-investment, we ask them to go through our Greenhouse training.”

The Greenhouse Leader Development program focuses on leadership principles that have worked in diverse ministry contexts.

“They would learn new entrepreneurial skill sets and develop their plan for a sustainable new church start, and then they can apply for funding,” Aycock said.

For Fresh Expressions ministries, such as groups that meet in brew pubs and tattoo parlors, training is available but not required.

The Ohio conferences have committed $500,000 per year to support new ministries, he said.

The Greenhouse program is bearing fruit. The Rev. Allyssa Graves and the Rev. Joe Graves, husband-wife pastors, have found success implementing very different church starts in Columbus. The latter has written a book on the topic, “The Progressive Planter.”

Establishing one set of principles that applies to launching any new church is a hard goal, but the Rev. Joe Graves thinks he’s cracked it.

The book came from his experience launching the more traditional Cityview Church and helping his wife start a church community for people recovering from addiction.

“Finding the principles between these two, as well as talking to colleagues who did a variety of other experiences, is really what kind of produced it,” he said.

The instructions in “The Progressive Planter” are meant to provide the tools and strategy to establish an inclusive, theologically healthy church with community impact.

Instructions include “crafting a vision, recruiting leaders, working with parent churches and denominations, marketing, reclaiming evangelism and cultivating generous givers.”

“I really feel like evangelicals had a market on church planting for a variety of reasons,” Graves said. “Myself and my wife … came out of the evangelical perspective and changed views and became more mainline and progressive.”

Graves said he modifies “some evangelical practices and reinterprets them in what I believe (are) healthier ways and more theologically robust ways.”

“So I began to identify this need: How do you plant a church that’s actually going to make the world a better place without leaning into some of the toxic things that we’ve seen?”

Books with theological arguments about why a church should be started are plentiful, he said.

“I’ve been informed by theologians, and I think all that’s really important,” Graves said. “But when you’re in the middle of a church plant and your ability to gather people and raise money is going to impact whether you could be paid; and nothing exists because you haven’t started it yet; and you’ve got to find the staff to do children’s mission; and you’ve got to find the staff to do worship, well, theoretical isn’t always helpful in that situation.”

The Sunday morning worship experience is “not the major drive for making new people comfortable or reaching out to new people,” Jung said.

Fresh Expressions meetings in unique settings and small group ministries are the right approaches to engage people in 2026, he said.

Church plants come in many forms, and the Ohio conferences are going to try different approaches as they seek to reach their goal.

Here’s a look at some of them:

Campus ministry

The Ohio State University is “ginormous,” said the Rev. Hannah VanMeter, but for years it lacked a “full-fledged, running-on-the-ground United Methodist campus ministry.”

More than 66,000 students are enrolled at the university.

VanMeter, Ohio State University campus pastor for Short North Church in Columbus, leads the United Methodist presence with an old standby.

“We do something called Doughnuts and Devotions,” VanMeter said. “So we hand out free doughnuts. Now we’re up to four dozen within an hour.”

The doughnuts help the seven or eight people staffing the United Methodist table on the university quad interact with about 50 students once a week.

“They come every week because they know that we’re there, regardless of if they come to our Monday night worship or church on Sunday,” VanMeter said. “They know that this is a place where they’re loved and they’re welcomed and they’re seen and accepted. And then maybe they come to have genuine conversation.”

Remnant churches

When the vote was tallied, about 70% of the congregation of First United Methodist Church in Marysville, Ohio, chose to disaffiliate from The United Methodist Church. Later, they joined the breakaway Global Methodist Church denomination.

That left some 70 First United Methodist members with a decision to make. A few decided to stay put. The rest were at loose ends.

Shortly thereafter, the Rev. Sara McSwords accepted the task of leading what is called a “remnant church,” one formed by United Methodists whose church has disaffiliated against their wishes.

“In May of 2022, a district superintendent approached me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve heard from the large and only United Methodist church in Marysville, Ohio, that they’re going to be working toward disaffiliation,’” McSwords said. “If they do that, then there’s no United Methodist presence in that city anymore.”

Marysville is a “very, very conservative place,” she said. “It was hard to imagine something new, something different than what you see in most rural Ohio communities.”

She got contact information for the 70 people who had wanted to stay United Methodist. After an informational meeting in November, a Christmas Eve service was planned at the National Guard Training Center.

The service was held despite a snowstorm that day.

“And 120 people showed up for worship that night,” McSwords said. “I preached a message about how Jesus was told there was no room for him in the inn. … So if you feel like there’s no room for your questions, for what you believe or who you love, for how you vote, whatever the case may be, we’re creating space here in the Beloved United Methodist Church.”

The new church is called Beloved United Methodist Church. It meets in the local National Guard Training Center or the YWCA each Sunday, drawing about 100 worshippers.

“Our second summer of existing, we … took a vote to become a Reconciling Ministries Network (congregation),” McSwords said.

Reconciling Ministries Network churches have declared their intention to allow LGBTQ people to participate fully in church life.

Church inside a church

St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Columbus was drawing five people most Sundays for worship. Then COVID-19 hit, shutting everything down. St. Mark’s was a white church in a neighborhood that had changed to a mostly Hispanic population. 

“The church was declining,” said the Rev. Elizabeth Ortiz-Herrera, pastor of Iglesia Hispana in Columbus.

With the support of Grove City United Methodist Church in Grove City, Ohio, Ortiz-Herrera was brought in to reach out to the Hispanic people in the neighborhood. She started a Hispanic Sunday service in 2021.

She was planting a church inside another church. It was complicated.

“Opening a multicultural church in the United States, it’s something completely different,” Ortiz-Herrera said. “I speak Spanish, but I’m from Mexico, and every country is not the same. Even though they all speak Spanish, it’s completely different cultures. So it’s really challenging. It’s something new. It’s something that we are learning.”

In Mexico, worship can take four or five hours, but Ortiz-Herrera tries to keep it at two.

“A super challenge for me as a woman is that many times it’s only the men who are here working,” she said. “They’re coming to work and send money back (to their relatives in other countries). They really want to belong to the church, but the more work they can do, the more work they are going to be doing.”

Ortiz-Herrera took part in the Ohio conferences’ Greenhouse Leader Development program.

“I think it’s something that a lot of church planters should go to,” she said. “Greenhouse helped me to do more things with excellence. We are doing it now in Spanish, so Spanish-speaking leaders, we can provide that to them.”

Recently, 100 lay and clergy leaders in Ohio met at Sunbury United Methodist Church in Sunbury, Ohio, to talk strategy. Jung said it was important to revitalize established churches while simultaneously planting new faith communities. 

“This is our concrete call: to build a new culture of renewal, to embrace diversity, and to extend heartfelt love through every community we plant and every church we revitalize,” Jung told the gathering. “God is doing a new thing in Ohio Land. Let us strengthen what is rooted, dare what is new, and trust that in both, Christ is bringing life for the healing of the world.”

Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digests.