History
Surge began over ten years ago as a vision for planting and multiplying churches all over the world on an unprecedented scale. The strategy was born in the heart of Pastor Larry Stockstill upon hearing of the Gideons’ strategy for distributing bibles to every home on earth. They divided the world into twelve zones and appointed a trusted man over each zone to oversee the effort in his region. Pastor Larry applied this principle to church planting, and partnered with key apostolic leaders in twelve zones around the world with the goal of planting a church among every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.
The initiative took shape as the Global 12 Project in the year 2000. Beginning with the single church planted in El Salvador that year, we began to see an amazing level of multiplication. By 2009, over 2,000 churches were planted in a single year. The total number of churches planted around the world since the inception of the Global 12 Project has exceeded 20,000!
At the turn of the new decade in 2010, Pastor Larry met with the global team and a fresh commitment was made for another ten years of church planting. It had become clear that God’s hand was on the Global 12 Project in a special way, and in effort to keep in step with what God was doing, Pastor Larry presented a fresh vision for the next season of global church planting. What began as a simple, strategic church planting project had clearly become something more: an explosive movement of multiplying the gospel globally, amounting to a new paradigm in world missions.
Using the name “Surge” to capture this idea of a sweeping, powerful movement, he set forth a vision to plant another 30,000 churches in rural villages all over the world. In addition, having noted the effectiveness and fruitfulness of planting a larger church in a major city, he cast the vision to plant 300 urban, “Strategic” churches in cities of over 1 million people that would grow to over 1,000 members and become centers of training and sending new works to impact entire regions with the gospel.
This groundbreaking type of urban church plant, combined with the already explosive method of planting rural churches, has set Surge apart as a unique, strategic missions movement that is leading the way today into reaching the unreached on a global scale.
