Growth Potential:

A group of four to six families would begin a communal church with the four to six men being the elders. The communal church would love one another through their actions and reach out to the world around them.
The church’s goal would be to grow to about 200 members living near the church. By this time the church will be ready to nominate other elders and send them out to plant new communal churches in other parts of town, the metroplex, the state, America, or the world.
The home church would decrease back down to 60 or so members while the many groups of 4-6 elders with their families would relocate in other communities.
This calls for members to be more dedicated to Christ’s Church than to their status in this world. It requires those with more permanent jobs to help support those who move their families. It requires trust in others and friendships that are close enough in the Lord to provide for others without being taken advantage of by the dependent church planters. Also, this movement of members to a new church plant frees up homes nearby for new converts to move into in order to be more involved and be discipled better.
If the churches split every three years, and if every family works to bring two converts into the congregation every year, within twenty years the entire earth has the possibility of coming to Christ. (The statistic of 8 billion in twenty years comes from taking six families and multiplying it by 2 for the first year and 2.72 for every year after that since not only the new converts are winning people to Christ, but the prior converts are as well. This takes 22 years, if you just include converts, but if you factor in the converts families and children it would be considerably less. If converts each only led two people to Christ and then stopped it would take just 30 years.)
This discipleship model can work within this context because communal churches develop elders through discipleship, close living, and working together to praise God and make His glory known to the world.
Lastly, growth is possible, but it is not the reason for communal churches. The reason for communal churches is that they provide the most vitality and joy for Christian sojourners on this earth.