Converging Streams

A guest speaker preached Sunday morning. He is our pastor’s church-planting coach (I don’t remember the guy’s name, though). He delivered a message about the necessity of the continual multiplication of new churches – standard new church mantra. During his sermon, he quoted this from the book Lost in America:

“The unchurched population in the United States is so extensive that, if it were a nation, it would be the fifth most populated nation on the planet after China, the former Soviet Union, India, and Brazil. Thus, our unchurched population is the largest mission field in the English-speaking world and the fifth largest globally.” (emphasis mine)

I thought, “hmmm…that’s worth remembering.” So, I wrote down the basics of that statistic. His conclusion was that newer churches are necessary because the mission field is huge in the States.

Yesterday, I was reading The Emerging Church, a book that has a lot to do about the need for a cultural shift in the way most churches “do” church. Without beginning to understand postmodernism, the church in the U.S. will become less effective in reaching future generations than it currently is. He used that same quote to show the fact that the United States really isn’t a “Christian” nation anymore. Since I had heard that quote the day before, it really popped out.

On top of that, I had a conversation a few days ago with someone at school about my church planting class I took last week. I told him about our group project and how we were helping create a proposal for a church planting strategy in Portugal. He said to me with a smile, “Good. America doesn’t need any more churches.”

I think these three instances have helped to solidify my position a little bit. While I understand and agree with the necessity to continue to reach out to the world, we cannot neglect the “homefront,” too. If the quote that the “single, most-effective form of evangelism is in church planting,” then doesn’t that support the argument that America does need more churches?

What about trying to revitalize older churches, though? Isn’t there a place for that? God is the God of resurrection. He can resurrect dying congregations and breathe new life into them. There has to be some type of balance somewhere.

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Howdy. I'm Matt. My wife, Christy, and I have four kids and two dogs, I'm passionate about orphan care. I'm a die-hard fan of the Evansville Aces, the Indiana Hoosiers, and Star Wars. I'm trying to live life by the Todd family motto: "It behooves us to live!"
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