A friend from a region known for low church attendance recently posed the question, “Why is there so little church growth here when we have such a rich spiritual heritage?”
I suggested many factors, like an angry enemy, an encroaching secularism and an endemic prayerlessness. These answers satisfied me for a while, but then I started to think about societal developments over the last century. I propose that urbanization accounts for at least part of the percentage decline in community church involvement.
During the Great Awakenings and other historical revivals, my friend’s region had one or two burgeoning parishes in every hamlet. The churches were large enough and communities small enough to accommodate everyone who was coming to Jesus.
Today, the population has far outpaced the churches. Even on Christmas and Easter, when most city churches are standing-room only, hundreds of thousands are not in attendance. Population growth has eclipsed local church reproduction. There aren’t enough churches to receive everyone who could be saved should God rekindle revival.
I want to be clear that I’m not just talking about a pew shortage. There are simply too few reproducing Christians to adequately disciple everyone, especially when those same Christians frequently have other practical and relational responsibilities in their church networks.
So what can we do? How do we grow the Church in a way that effectively permeates the massive unchurched community?
Most churches continue to employ an invitational evangelism strategy, but holiday influxes have shown us that even the most successful invitation campaign could never adequately disciple everyone. Instead, we need more churches.
More churches accomplishes at least three things:
- More intimate, relational networks to foster discipleship
- More responsiveness to the cultural idiosyncrasies of hidden sociopeoples
- Existing leaders can raise up a few more leaders rather than discipling enormous numbers of new Christians
Acts 2 reminds us that intimacy contributed to first century church growth. People can only handle so many intimate friendships.
We need to plant new, responsive churches to effectively reach the unchurched.
Welcome Ethne 