1. AMERICA HAS BECOME A HUGE AND IMPORTANT MISSION FIELD
•Recent research states that there are now 195 million non-churched people in America, making America one of the top four largest "unchurched" nations in the world.
•"The American church is in the midst of one of the largest mission fields in the world today. Only three other nations—China, India, and Indonesia—have more lost people." (1) –Justice Anderson
•"Essentially, what was a churched, supposedly Christian culture has become an unchurched, post-Christian culture. People in our culture are not antichurch; they simply view the church as irrelevant to their lives." (2) –Aubrey Malphurs
•In spite of the rise of mega-churches, no county in America has a greater church population than it did ten years ago. (3) –Ron Sylvia
•During the last ten years, combined communicant membership of all Protestant denominations declined by 9.5 percent (4,498,242), while the national population increased by 11.4 percent (24,153,000). (4) –Tom Clegg
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2 comments:
Robin:
1. I distrust Church Growth writers, especially "American evangelicals."
2. Do we need new churches or the revitalization of old ones?
Pondering it.
R/
DVP
Phil,
The need for new churches for me is a given. We will never have enough churches. Churches are like living creatures. They have a life cycle. They grow, reproduce, decline, and die. Sadly too many churches grow, decline, and die but never reproduce.
Every new generation must be evangelized. This includes the children and grandchildren of believing Christians. The Sunday morning service continues to be the main setting in which people hear the gospel.
While God can and does call people directly, the most common way that He calls them is through His Word. As George Whitfield recognized, we play a part in the salvation of others as the instruments of God. God entrusts the preaching and teaching of His Word to us. This does not mean that their salvation is our doing. We are only instruments. A trumpet cannot play itself. Someone must blow into it and operate the valves.
One of the realities that we must face is that unchurched people are more likely to attend a new church than they are an existing one. My area of western Kentucky has numerous churches. Some people might say that the area is over-churched on the basis of the number of churches. The area also has a large unchurched population. The unchurched population is growing. Despite their large number the existing churches are not reaching the unchurched population. This is in part due to the tendency of these churches to minister to existing church members. The churches that are reaching the unchurched population are the new churches and they are making only a small dent in that population segment.
Revitalizing a declining church takes a pastor with a particular set of gifts and talents and a congregation that has a strong commitment to change and to welcoming and incorporating new people into the life and worship of the church, including its leadership. Like John the Baptist they must be willing to diminish that others may increase. They must work together to overcome a number of dynamics that work against turning a church around.
At certain stages in the life cycle of a church one may be able to introduce a new vision that may cause a church to experience a new lease on life. When a church reaches a plateau, the longer the church remains on that plateau, the more difficult it is to move the church off the plateau. The more steeply a church moves into decline, the less the likelihood of arresting the church’s decline and reversing it.
Even if we were successful in revitalizing a large number of existing churches, we would still need new churches to keep pace with population growth. To me it is not a question of either one or the other. We should be doing both.
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