Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Been To The Bay...
...or Back From The Looking Glass.
Spent a 3-day weekend in the San Francisco Bay area. Good friends, can't complain about that, but in general, the place is a looney bin. Makes LA look like the Bible Belt. Uncovered an amazing statistic -- only 3% of people in the bay area ever enter a house of worship -- of any kind, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, you name it -- only 3%.
Churches there are struggling mightily. At what point does a place cease to be a "Christian" place, which is how we think of America, and become a "mission field." I know, I know, "the whole world is a mission field," and all that -- but I'm talking on a different level here. There are lots of places in the world with a higher percentage of Christians than the bay area that are considered mission fields, meaning we send in missionaries with support from some place else.
In a practical sense, a mission field is a place where the gospel has not sufficiently penetrated for the churches there to be self-supporting. Christian churches of every stripe are closing in the bay area rather routinely precisely because they cannot support themselves. So here is my question, why are these denominations blithely allowing these churches to fold? In a designated missions field a church building is considered a huge asset from which to do the work of missions, and the denomination supports that by raising money from churches in home areas.
I am deadly serious about this, instead of closing these churches, send the pastors elsewhere in the country to do their pastoral ministry and send in the missionaries. The statistics say it's time.
Spent a 3-day weekend in the San Francisco Bay area. Good friends, can't complain about that, but in general, the place is a looney bin. Makes LA look like the Bible Belt. Uncovered an amazing statistic -- only 3% of people in the bay area ever enter a house of worship -- of any kind, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, you name it -- only 3%.
Churches there are struggling mightily. At what point does a place cease to be a "Christian" place, which is how we think of America, and become a "mission field." I know, I know, "the whole world is a mission field," and all that -- but I'm talking on a different level here. There are lots of places in the world with a higher percentage of Christians than the bay area that are considered mission fields, meaning we send in missionaries with support from some place else.
In a practical sense, a mission field is a place where the gospel has not sufficiently penetrated for the churches there to be self-supporting. Christian churches of every stripe are closing in the bay area rather routinely precisely because they cannot support themselves. So here is my question, why are these denominations blithely allowing these churches to fold? In a designated missions field a church building is considered a huge asset from which to do the work of missions, and the denomination supports that by raising money from churches in home areas.
I am deadly serious about this, instead of closing these churches, send the pastors elsewhere in the country to do their pastoral ministry and send in the missionaries. The statistics say it's time.
