At the 2024 ARC Conference, Dino Rizzo, President of ARC, shared an update on the past year and the organization’s future.
We are focusing on two things: We want the couples planting churches to be healthier and to see stronger launch days. We’re spending more time with our planting couples during the assessment phase of the process. We are doing everything we can to make sure that the couples planting churches are healthy—biblically healthy, spiritually healthy, emotionally healthy, mentally healthy, relationally healthy, and healthy in ministry. A total of 122 couples have completed the improved assessment.
We’re focusing on building more community and making more connections between ARC church planters and their launch coaches. Each church planter has approximately 150 points of contact with their launch coach.
As each couple reaches their one-year mark after launching their church, we invite them to attend the Retreat at Church Creek. The retreat is dedicated time to refresh and sit with others in the same season of life.
As we focus on strong launches, we start with the cities our planters choose to plant in—cities underserved by the local church and cities with growing populations. In the last 12 months, we’ve launched 37 churches together.
The ultimate goal is to transform lives with the message of Jesus. In 2021, an average of 7.8 people chose Christ on launch day. In 2022, this number increased to 9.6. In 2023, it skyrocketed to an average of 28 people. And in 2024, we’re witnessing an average of 29 salvations per launch day, a testament to Jesus.
We cannot overstate the importance of planning for a strong launch day. In 2019, the average launch day attendance was 285 people. In 2020, it increased to 337 people. In 2021 and 2022, the numbers dipped due to Covid-19. But in 2023, the average launch day attendance increased to 427 people per launch. In 2024, we’re seeing an average of 607 people attending each launch, a testament to the effectiveness of training and the resources each church planter receives.
ARC’s founder, Billy Hornsby, said, “My greatest accomplishment is somebody else’s.” That is the heartbeat of ARC. We are excited about the churches that have been planted and the lives that are being saved, but what we’re most excited about is the next one: the next city, the next planters, the next church, and the next life transformed by Jesus.
