Thursday, November 08, 2007
Common Sense Comes Into Play
A while back, Tod Bolsinger reported:
What these statistics say is that the average Christian, not the unchurched, but the average CHRISTIAN, at least as measured by being a church goer, is in search of the next great experience. They move from church to church, following trends in teaching, leadership, music, whatever, but there is no commitment, there is no depth.
Why is that? Oh there are about a billion reasons, from the church failing at its mission to American culture to good old fashioned sin. So how do we get on the right track?
Well, like most things, the answer is simple to talk about and oh-so-hard to do. Let's start with ourselves. Let's eradicate our own sin so we do not pass it down through those we teach and into our institutions. Let's grab the gospel, not the won't-go-to-hell gospel, but the transformative, radical gospel for our own.
Twelve men, twelve men truly tranformed by Jesus Christ changed the world more profoundly than any other time in history. This isn't organizational rocket science - it's about truth and goodness. If we simply dare to allow ourselves to be as radically transformed as they were, the world will change, people will change, the church will flourish, in ways and forms that we cannot even imagine.
We are the problem. We must allow God to make us into the solution.
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Sally Morgenthaler, author of the book Worship Evangelism, has given up on the notion. In this article she despairs that her thoughtful book became an excuse for churches to develop an "if you build it they will come approach" to evangelism that has both failed in developing proper worship and truly effective authentic evangelism. Today, instead, she challenges leaders to separate worship from evangelism so that we can honor God in the first and live with and love our neighbors as the means to the second.Tod links to this article by Ms. Morgenthaler.This is a meaty piece that should be read and digested, over and over. But this is the heart to me:
Or they point to the well-advertised fact that both the number and average size of megachurches increased between the early '90s and early 2000s. Between 1994 and 2004, church attendance in congregations between 1,000 and 2,000 grew 10.3 percent. Congregations over 2,000 grew 21.5 percent.1 According to a Hartford Seminary study titled "Megachurches Today 2005," there are 1,210 Protestant churches in the United States with weekly attendance over 2,000, nearly double the number that existed in 2000.2There is a great deal of commentary that could be offered about those statistics. We could berate churches for poaching from other churches. We could talk about paying attention to the institution instead of the mission. But I want to focus on what this says about the average Christian.
Yet, according to The Barna Group, the number of adults who did not attend church nearly doubled in the same time period.3 In a parallel trend, pollsters were charting the lowest ratings for religion in 60 years.4 With both numbers and attitudes of the unchurched going in the opposite direction, where was all the growth in these big-and-getting-bigger churches coming from?
Location just might be a clue. Nearly 72 percent of churches with average weekly attendance of at least 2,000 people are found in a swath from Georgia and Florida across Texas to California...roughly the Bible Belt and the most churchgoing sectors of the Sun Belt.5 It's hard not to see the correlation.
As influential as they are, megachurches aren't the whole story of American religion. To get a complete picture of church growth in the 1990s and new millennium, we need to look at overall church attendance patterns. Traditional pollsters conduct telephone interviews and expect people to be honest about their religious practices. According to the numbers gathered this way, we're still at a 40 percent attendance rate. But pollsters who actually do seat counts and take exit polls tell a different story. The average weekly church attendance when measured by actual "bodies present" was at 17.4 percent in 2006, down from 20.4 percent in 1990.6 David Olson of TheAmericanChurch.org remarks, "You'd have to find 80 million more people that churches forgot to count to get to 40 percent."7
The upshot? For all the money, time, and effort we've spent on cultural relevance—and that includes culturally relevant worship—it seems we came through the last 15 years with a significant net loss in churchgoers, proliferation of megachurches and all.
What these statistics say is that the average Christian, not the unchurched, but the average CHRISTIAN, at least as measured by being a church goer, is in search of the next great experience. They move from church to church, following trends in teaching, leadership, music, whatever, but there is no commitment, there is no depth.
Why is that? Oh there are about a billion reasons, from the church failing at its mission to American culture to good old fashioned sin. So how do we get on the right track?
Well, like most things, the answer is simple to talk about and oh-so-hard to do. Let's start with ourselves. Let's eradicate our own sin so we do not pass it down through those we teach and into our institutions. Let's grab the gospel, not the won't-go-to-hell gospel, but the transformative, radical gospel for our own.
Twelve men, twelve men truly tranformed by Jesus Christ changed the world more profoundly than any other time in history. This isn't organizational rocket science - it's about truth and goodness. If we simply dare to allow ourselves to be as radically transformed as they were, the world will change, people will change, the church will flourish, in ways and forms that we cannot even imagine.
We are the problem. We must allow God to make us into the solution.
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