Meet the people ‘planting’ new churches — and drawing new believers — in the Boise area
In 2009, Tim Nay had just moved to Star. At a festival that year, he decided to rent a booth, where he asked people who stopped by: If you could ask God one question, what would it be?
“If God is God, how come my sister died? If God is God, why did he allow this bad thing to happen?” he recalls people asking. “That’s probably the biggest one — why bad things happen to good people.”
Asking around, he found that few people in the area regularly attended services. But from the questions people posed, he could see that “there was a spiritual need in the area that was very, very honest and real,” he said.
Star’s population had been growing rapidly — from 7,930 in 2015 to 19,920 in 2024, according to Compass, the regional planning agency — but the number of churches in the area hadn’t kept pace, said Nay, now the lead pastor of LifeSpring Christian Church. Like churches nationwide, many congregations in the Boise area dwindled over the years as their members aged and they struggled to attract younger generations of worshipers.
In their place came pastors like Nay, eager to start new churches from the ground up. They do this by “planting” churches with support from existing churches and church-planting organizations.
Church planters focus on “connecting the unconnected to Jesus,” setting goals to establish a certain number of new churches or convert a certain number of people to Christianity, according to the websites of two groups that support church planting. In the last 20 years, Intermountain Church Planters, an organization that supports church plants in the Intermountain West, has planted nearly 30 churches this way, including seven in the Treasure Valley, according to data its leaders shared with the Statesman.
Intermountain Church Planters isn’t just interested in finding pastors who can start a new church, said Steve Edwards, the organization’s founder and former executive director.
“We’re interested in helping you be a multiplying church,” he said. “We hope we’ll be planting a church that plants other churches.”
Nondenominational churches amass in Boise area
As Intermountain Church Planters refines its process for planting new churches, its pace is increasing: Instead of starting one church every three years, in recent years, the organization has started two churches every year.
“The more we learned, the more it started burgeoning,” Edwards said. Because planted churches can in turn help to plant others, “it’s sort of like multiply instead of add,” he said.
All Christian denominations are involved to some extent in church planting, said Toney Salva, the executive director of Evergreen, a church-planting organization that has started about 70 new churches in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada and British Columbia since its founding in the 1960s.
But nondenominational churches tend to be more active in this space, given their relative independence and flexibility, said Jakob King, the minister of administration at Eagle Christian Church. His is a nondenominational church planted in the 1990s that now has about 4,500 members and four campuses — and has helped to plant other Treasure Valley churches, including LifeSpring.
If the nation’s independent and nondenominational churches were combined into a single group, they would represent the second-largest cluster of congregations in the country after the Southern Baptist Convention, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, which studies churches, denominations, seminaries and other religious communities. In Idaho, Ada and Canyon counties are home to the greatest density of these churches, according to the institute.
Rather than forming ever-larger churches, church planting is intended to be self-perpetuating. New churches build their own capacity, gain independence and then send off clergy and members to start more churches.
Nay and his family moved from Kentucky to Star to help get LifeSpring off the ground after the former church at the site, one of the oldest in the state, endured internal conflict and aging membership. Its congregation reached out to Evergreen and Intermountain Church Planters for help getting a new church started. Existing churches around the country, including Bridges Christian Church — where Nay worked in Kentucky — offered support.
Today, LifeSpring has about 400 members, many of whom are new to Christianity, Nay told the Idaho Statesman. The church baptized about 25 people, most of whom were between 12 and 40, in 2024 and has baptized nearly 300 people since its founding, Nay estimated.
LifeSpring is about two years away from spinning off a church plant of its own, which will eventually become independent, Nay said. Last year, LifeSpring reorganized its entire staff to prepare for the change, and this year the church is reworking its training program before it hires a “resident planter” — an experienced minister — to get to know the church.
In about two years, Nay hopes, LifeSpring will send the planter and between 50 and 100 of its members off to start a new church.
“We just want to see another congregation birthed,” Nay said. “It’s the No. 1 way to reach people that don’t know about Jesus.”
Opportunity despite ‘stunning’ number of churches closing
Churches in the U.S. have been struggling for decades. In 2019, 4,500 churches closed permanently, according to Lifeway Research, which conducts surveys and research on trends in church culture. That closure rate accelerated during COVID-19, as the pandemic broke some people’s habit of attending church, The Guardian reported in 2023. Protestant pastors reported in 2022 that church attendance was down by 15% since before the pandemic.
“Though there remain ‘Bible belts’ of traditional conservatism in various parts of society where the Christian church still commands significant forms of influence — these places are increasingly both cultural and geographic shrinking ‘islands’ in the larger society,” wrote Tim Keller, a pastor who encouraged church planting as the solution to this problem. Multiple church planters cited Keller as a key influence on their work.
Many offer theories about what’s driving this decline. Some blame churches’ decisions to try to fit into modern society by downplaying traditional norms around sex, money and other issues. Some say churches have gotten too involved in politics — on both the left and the right. Some, like Nay, say many churches have failed to stay “relevant” in their music, sermons or the way they express their faith.
“We’re in the age where, if things aren’t packaged right, they get ignored,” Nay said. “Churches need to keep up with that. They need to pass on their faith to the younger generation and allow them to express it.”
The number of churches closing is “stunning,” said George Johnson, Evergreen’s former executive director. Even as church-planting organizations such as his have refined their approach and helped start new churches at a quickening pace, it’s been hard to keep up with all the closures, he said.
“From our point of view, in new church work, we’ve always been behind and getting behinder, if you will,” Johnson said.
But the Northwest, including Idaho, offers fertile ground for these efforts, church planters say — ironically because it’s a part of the country where few people regularly attend church.
2 in 5 Idahoans atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’
In Boise, only 9% of people are in church on an average Sunday, Derek Murphy, the executive director of Intermountain Church Planters, told the Statesman. In 2022, 40% of Idahoans identified as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” according to a study by Ryan Burge, a pastor and professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University.
“There’s a different type of person that was attracted to come out here, and that even still is attracted,” Murphy said. “I think they’re more individualistic. The ‘rugged individualism’ of America was at an even greater level in places like Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Montana and Utah. I think these are places that it was harder to get a core of people, because community is a big piece of what church brings.”
Those who don’t attend church are just the people that organizations like Intermountain Church Planters are looking for, he said. New church plants tend to be more attractive to these people than to those who already attend church somewhere else.
These churches tend to be led by younger pastors in their 20s, 30s and 40s, who in turn attract younger members. And the churches often start off as relatively informal and unintimidating — perhaps meeting in an elementary school, as LifeSpring did, or in a congregant’s home.
“There’s a trend of deconstructing authority in our country,” Nay said. “Some have felt like the structure is the problem.”
Amid the Treasure Valley’s rapid growth, church planters see an opportunity.
“Those are great places for church planting, because of the dynamics of people moving in,” Johnson said. “They don’t have doctors, they don’t have grocery stores, they don’t have friends yet or neighbors, and so as they move in, they’re starting fresh and new in many ways. So those are always rich places to prospect for relationships and connect with people.”
Rapid growth also prompts an “urgency to reproduce” as churches aim to stay relevant, Salva said.
“Nothing else — not crusades, outreach programs, parachurch ministries, growing megachurches, congregational consulting, nor church renewal processes — will have the consistent impact of dynamic, extensive church planting,” Keller wrote. “The vigorous, continual planting of new congregations is the single most crucial strategy for the numerical growth of the body of Christ.”
