While many civil society organizations and social movements have contracted in recent decades, certain faith communities, in particular Christian evangelical churches, have multiplied both in the United States and abroad. Church multiplication has historically been a tool used by Western imperialists to colonize non-western indigenous lands and peoples. Christianity’s center of gravity, however, has moved southward (Jenkins, 2006). As religious immigrants move from the Global South to cities in the Global North, they are planting evangelical churches in Western countries and shifting the politics, implications, and dynamics of church multiplication.

This study examines the church planting movement in the Philippines and through the Filipino diaspora in the United States and asks, “why and how do churches form and multiply?” This study argues that faith, specifically the beliefs of the Christian faith are shared through various channels that leads to the formation and spread of Christian churches. This study specifically examines four different church planting networks within the International Baptist Church (IBC) network in the Philippines and the United States. These networks will be examined at both the individual and organizational level. First, I conduct life history interviews to explore the beliefs that mobilizes them to engage in church planting. Second, I examine 10 autonomous Filipino churches: 1) two native churches that have been formed and planted in the provincial areas of the Philippines by a church located within Metro-Manila; 2) two indigenous churches located in Cainta, a major city within Metro-Manila; 2) one Filipino immigrant Baptist church that formed and planted another church in Anaheim, California; and 3) three Filipino immigrant Baptist churches in Taylor, Warren, and Belleville, Michigan. In each site, I conduct focus group interviews and engage in participant observation to investigate the processes and mechanisms that lead to the formation and spread of Christian churches.

Collective action has been studied by social movement scholars as an empirical outcome resulting, in part, from a culturally resonant frame. That is, individuals construct shared cultural meanings that then mobilize people to act collectively – to join demonstrations, engage in sit-ins, and protest. While church planting is certainly not the type of collective action social movement scholars derive their understandings from, I find that the theoretical foundations of social movement studies of why people come together and act collectively to achieve a common goal are relevant and useful in the context of church planting. Through this study, we gain a deeper social movement insight on faith and mobilization, the generation of collective identity, and the formation of shared collective beliefs that leads to a structural organization, that is, the Christian church.