Aaron Burke launched Radiant Church a decade ago in a rundown movie theater in Tampa, Fla., offering a model of Christianity increasingly popular among America’s faithful.
The church leans conservative on matters of gender and sexuality, and its services feature a Pentecostal-style exuberance with high-energy bands and entertaining sermons. Radiant drew fewer than 200 guests in the early days. It now averages nearly 8,000 in nine church locations.
Burke, a pastor ordained in the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, started his church with more than faith. He sold a thrift store in Pensacola, Fla., and raised other funds, including $30,000 from the Association of Related Churches, a franchise-style church network known as ARC.
Aaron Burke during the 2024 ARC conference in Birmingham, Ala. PHOTO: CHARITY RACHELLE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
ARC functions as a startup accelerator, providing money and mentoring in exchange for a continuing cut of church revenues that it invests in opening new churches.
Similar entrepreneurial networks are sprouting new, largely nondenominational places of worship at a time when many traditional church congregations are shrinking. The new churches are opening across the U.S., from urban centers to suburbs, red states and blue, as well as abroad. The “church-planting” networks, established as nonprofit organizations, deploy marketing, branding and social-media strategies akin to other franchise businesses.
“We need pastors that know how to lead in the church with marketplace principles,” said Burke, 40 years old, who has an M.B.A. and a doctorate in ministry. In addition to operating the thrift store, he has made money buying and selling used vehicles.
ARC has started 1,114 churches in the U.S. and abroad since 2001, including 40 last year. Average attendance on launch day was about 500 people in the first quarter this year, the organization said. Another church-startup network, Acts 29, currently has 644 churches, mostly in the U.S., as well as in Italy, Mexico and Thailand.
This article is extracted from the Wall Street Journal.