Church Planting Profile
A Rebuilding Downtown, an Up-and-Coming Suburb, and in Need of the Gospel
Sun Prairie is both a rebuilding and an up-and-coming suburb. Driving into downtown, you will spot 1950s ranch houses filling out whole neighborhoods, but further outside the city limits subdivisions are being built every day. The city represents some of Dane County's fastest growth on the East side with a strategic position that has direct access to both Madison and Milwaukee.
Sun Prairie is both a rebuilding and an up-and-coming suburb.
Field note — At a coffee shop
Jinx Coffee fills downtown with young families in the summer, with an ice cream shop and bookstore nearby. It is a popular location for getting out of the sun. Across the street, the old town hall looms next to a building still being rebuilt from the 2018 gas explosion that devastated the town. Just beside the construction there are still many of the same restaurants that have served Sun Prairie for generations.
One of the largest concerns in Sun Prairie is navigating family relationships and loneliness. People worry about marriage problems, divorce, and raising children as a single parent above the national average. This concern extends into general loneliness.
Like much of the country, Sun Prairie is seeing a reduction in people identifying as Christians. This is not driven by people moving to atheism or other faiths but primarily moving to become part of the “nones.” With the rise of the nones, there is still a fairly large Lutheran and Catholic population consistent with the rest of the state. In addition, there is a growing charismatic presence in the city. In Sun Prairie, people have stopped attending church often because they found it boring or unfulfilling, but they would welcome a warm and friendly church if invited.
Sun Prairie has around 20 churches in and around the city. Many are mainline or Roman catholic churches, several are evangelical or Baptist, a few are conservative Lutheran, and there are even Hmong and Spanish speaking congregations. However, there is not a reformed congregation in the city of any denomination.
Every congregation in and around Sun Prairie, against the city limits
Catholic & mainline 6 Evangelical and/or confessional 12 Latter-day Saints 1Population, with Census-based projections
Bars start at zero. Source: Census Bureau; Synergos Technologies.
Share of residents by race and ethnicity
Predominantly white, and diversifying along with the county. Source: Census Bureau; Mosaic® USA.
All fifteen district schools, by state report-card rating
Twelve of the fifteen meet or exceed; three fall below.
Over the last five years, the city has grown by 9%, and it is expected to keep growing by 5% over the next five years, with 38,825 people in 2025, up to 40,950 by 2030, and even 42,960 by 2035. It is economically diverse, though high earning households are growing substantially in the city along with an increased educational attainment for adults. The city is predominantly white but continues to become more diverse with the rest of the county. Sun Prairie also expects to see an increase in retirees over the coming years as the population ages.
Sun Prairie is twenty minutes from downtown Madison, with access to the state capital (including the largest producer-only farmers' market in the country), University of Wisconsin athletics, four lakes, and more. Drive a little further and you are in Wisconsin's famous Driftless Region for hikes and recreation. The city is also 60 minutes from Milwaukee and just over 2 hours to Chicago. Housing is relatively affordable in the Madison area, with the median home price around $382k, but these values look to continue to rise as the city expands further in the coming years. Cost of living is otherwise close to par with the rest of the country.
The Sun Prairie school district performs well in the state — of its fifteen schools, seven exceed state expectations and five more meet them.
The Wisconsin Presbytery is committed and mobilized for church planting through the “On Wisconsin” network, providing structure and vision to support church planters, apprentices, and students who feel called to Wisconsin.
Madison is home to three PCA churches. The church planter will need to work with all three churches to help build a thriving group gospel centered community in Dane County for years to come.
A good candidate to plant in Sun Prairie will be prepared to prayerfully invest in relationships over an extended time in a city that values family but has lost touch with Jesus and his church. He will need to work in community to get to know families while reaching out to the rapidly growing suburbs. This congregation will not only need to be close with each other and to be able to offer a friendly welcome to newcomers with warmth.
He will need to challenge the idols of personal fulfillment and satisfaction in the congregation, showing that true contentment and belonging is only found in the Gospel of Jesus and the community he leads by his Spirit.
The Vision
That the church would flourish in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
Meeting families where they are as they navigate life. Showing that Christ offers new life and life to the full for those who are in him, pointing the whole body of believers to the truth in love Jesus shows us in his life.
Take a Next Step
Sun Prairie has roughly twenty churches and not one of them is Reformed. It is a city rebuilding its downtown and filling in new subdivisions every year, and it needs a church that will put down roots for the long haul. We are praying for the planter God is preparing. If that stirs something in you, or if someone came to mind as you read this, we would love to hear from you.
We are a community finding life in the gospel of Jesus in order to love God and neighbor and bless our city.