A new comparative report on 24 federations finds that church planting is a normal part of church life across Europe's Free Evangelical family, that a reported plant is often not yet a congregation, and that the numbers a fellowship keeps about itself are less solid than they look.
Between 2016 and 2026, the Free Evangelical federations of Europe started 227 new congregations. They began the decade with 2,205 congregations. They ended it with 2,141.
Both figures are true, and together they are the central puzzle of a report published for the IFFEC Worldwide conference in Nairobi. The State of Church Planting in IFFEC Europe, by Kenno Leier, compares 24 federations that together have about 190,000 members in 2,186 congregations. Its author calls it a first comparative overview, and what it says about the puzzle is as interesting as the puzzle itself. (It is self-published practitioner research and has not been peer-reviewed.)
A divided picture
The net loss of 64 congregations comes from the 23 federations that reported congregation counts at both dates. It hides a split. Fourteen of the 23 have more congregations than in 2016, and nine have fewer.
One federation accounts for the whole decline. Sweden's Equmeniakyrkan, formed in 2011 by the merger of the Baptist Union, the United Methodist Church and the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden, went from 697 congregations at the end of 2016 to 593 at the end of 2025, a net loss of 104. Without it, the other 22 federations gained 40 congregations, about 2.7 per cent.
Membership tells a similar story. Across the 16 federations whose membership can be compared strictly, it fell by about 3.5 per cent. Yet nine of those 16 grew, and the median change was an increase of 3.9 per cent. Without Equmeniakyrkan, the other fifteen grew by 1.2 per cent.
A reported plant is not yet a congregation
The report's most useful finding is about what the word "planted" counts. The survey asked how many congregations each federation had planted, and the question did not separate a plant from a constituted congregation. Only when federations were asked what had become of their plants did the difference appear.
"A reported church plant is not the same thing as a constituted congregation," the report concludes. The gap is large in the biggest federations, for example:
- Equmeniakyrkan started about 32 plants in the decade. Three became member congregations.
- Switzerland FREE planted ten congregations. Only three are described as strong today.
- Austria planted eleven, of which three are now self-sustaining.
At the other end, two federations converted every plant into a congregation. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, none of the plants was lost. The Czech respondent's explanation: "We plant too carefully, that's why we did not close any of them."
What the numbers could not see
The finding changes how the whole survey should be read. Planting figures "cannot be read as growth," Leier writes: "the fellowship planted roughly one congregation in ten and finished the decade smaller."
Verification changed the picture in other ways. Nine federations had reported a "membership" figure broader than registered members, counting children, regular attenders or both, and these were recalculated. The original questionnaire had not asked what had happened to congregations that disappeared. When Leier asked, 20 federations reported 283 closures, mergers or departures in the decade, 137 of them in Equmeniakyrkan alone.
"The numbers a fellowship keeps about itself are less solid than they look," the closing reflection says. That is a finding about the fellowship, Leier adds, and one that suggests better measurement is within reach, since the federations answered "willingly and in most cases quickly."
What the report recommends
The report's first practical proposal is modest: a short annual ledger of congregations planted, constituted, closed, merged, left and joined, of plants in progress and of baptisms, reported per 100 members. It also proposes a revised questionnaire, with 31 December 2030 as the next reference date.
Its broader conclusion is that church planting in the region is best understood as part of an "organisational ecosystem" of vision, leadership, structures, money and coaching, rather than as a programme or a technique for rapid growth. In societies shaped by secularisation, ageing and migration, it argues, a decade is too short a window: planting should be judged over a generation.
The author sums up the picture as neither flourishing nor decline: "Faithful and inventive church planting is found in federations of every size, in highly secular societies, in rural regions and growing cities, in countries losing much of their population to emigration and in a country at war."
This is the first in a series of reports from IFFEC Worldwide 2026. Read our guide to the conference and our earlier report on the church planting leaders' gathering in Budapest.
