If you tried to fit everything there is to know about planting churches into one book, it would probably look like Ed Stetzer’s book Planting Missional Churches. This encyclopaedic work, which is an updated and expanded version of Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age, covers big churches, small churches and house churches, but predominantly from a relatively conservative Western cultural viewpoint.
The author provides useful chapters on the Biblical basis of church planting, models of church plants and planters, church structure, leadership issues, emerging culture, developing a launch team, small groups, handling finances, choosing a name and logo, finding a meeting place, children’s ministry, and many other topics. These provide a comprehensive guide for the “normal” style of church plant. Other chapters cover “missional/incarnational” churches and “koinos” or house churches, but these are covered in less depth, and there is not much about non-Western churches and ethnic churches.
The book contains material gathered from numerous different sources, and various resources for further reading are listed at the end of each chapter. It was published four years ago and some of the content is a little bit out of date in view of rapid developments in culture and church planting trends since publication, but the vast majority of the content remains highly relevant. This book is an important reference for church planters and for churches which plant churches.