Kip McKean — thirty members in 1979, and a hundred thousand by 2002.
He took a small Massachusetts congregation and built a worldwide movement in twenty years by planting churches from a mission team and requiring every member to be discipled. He stepped down as world missions evangelist in November 2002, left the ICOC, and in 2006 founded a separate body.
McKean was a student at the University of Florida who came into the Crossroads campus ministry and absorbed its methods, and in June 1979 took a congregation of about thirty in Lexington, Massachusetts, on the condition that its members submit to being discipled. Growth was rapid and geographically deliberate: mission teams were sent from Boston to seed a church in a target city, with a named evangelist and a numerical plan, and by 1993-94 the network constituted itself as the International Churches of Christ with McKean as world missions evangelist. He resigned that role in November 2002 amid criticism of his leadership and of his family, took a sabbatical, and afterwards separated from the movement entirely; from 2006 he built a new body, the Portland or Sold Out movement, now the International Christian Church, which the ICOC treats as distinct. He has been named as a defendant in the recent litigation.
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