Church Planting and McDonald's

Ray Kroc was the genius who grew McDonald's from a family hamburger joint into a multi-national, multi-billion dollar franchise. He was an aggressive business man with a powerful vision for growth and expansion. While the company had already grown into a major corporation, Kroc wanted more. To find areas for expansion of his chain, he would take his chief executives aboard a plane and fly around to get a better view of the landscape. He pointed out the church steeples and said that he wanted a McDonald's everywhere they saw a steeple. Those steeples represented the families that he wanted to serve. Those churches were his market and he wanted to reach them with his hamburger and fries.

The Church can learn from Kroc, both good and bad. We don't need to offer Happy Meals with prizes inside. However, instead of focusing on a single generation at a time (Boomers, GenXers, Millennials, etc.) or on one particular demographic (Yuppies in the Burbs), we should be focusing on communities. Each community is unique with its own quirks and challenges. No book or program is sufficient to to reach that community, but a minister can learn his community and reach out to them. This is the pattern of the earliest missionaries and is still a viable approach.