Helping to fulfill the 2004 LCMS Synod convention mandate to plant 2,000 new congregations in the United States by 2017 as part of its Ablaze! initiative, LCMS World Mission provides leadership and assistance to help healthy congregations replicate themselves. Working with LCMS mission leaders, districts, and mission societies, 600 “healthy” Synod congregations that will commit to planting up to four “daughter” congregations each by 2017 are being identified and invited to spearhead this church-planting movement as "Ablaze! Covenant Congregations."

Lay leaders in each of the Ablaze! Covenant Congregations will be trained as church planters. Their theological education will be modeled after the Ethnic Immigrant Institute of Theology, a distance-education program based at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Mo., that trains immigrants as missionaries in less than four years.

The new missionary-training program, which was put in place by summer 2006 at both LCMS seminaries, has been dubbed “Missionary Pastor Leadership Development.” Traditional mission-track seminary students also will be recruited as church planters, as well as deaconesses, and other professional church workers. And a number of congregations may choose to put together church-planting teams of several people to guide their efforts rather than a single individual.

Every congregation--regardless of its growth potential--can take part in church planting by partnering with LCMS World Mission and other congregations to provide prayer and financial support, and perhaps even ministry leaders willing to serve outside their communities.

For its part, LCMS World Mission has earmarked a portion of its annual budget for new church development in North America. Ablaze! New Congregation Development Grant funds are made available primarily to the 600 church-planting congregations, but any LCMS congregation that’s interested in planting a daughter church may receive funding.