Church planting is hard, many pastors would say. But it's where much of the church growth is happening in America at a time when most churches are dying.
"Two-thirds of all churches in America are plateaued and declining," said Pastor Rick Warren after speaking Thursday to thousands of church planters at the Exponential Conference in Orlando, "and if it weren't for the growth that's taking place in church plants and megachurches, Christianity would be declining."
Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Community Church in Lake Forest, Calif., says the growth in church plants and megachurches has helped keep the Christian population in the United States from dropping.
His comments come as the latest statistics from the Southern Baptist Convention, of which his church is a part of, show baptisms have dropped for the third straight year in 2007 and total membership dipped. Some say membership has plateaued and is on a trend toward decline unless change happens within the 16-million member denomination. Southern Baptists are now being seen as one among many major Protestant groups that are declining.
News of the denomination's decline was released during the April 21-24 Exponential Conference where over 2,700 church planters and leaders attended to analyze the DNA of successful reproducing churches. The annual conference has been touted as the "mother of all church planting conferences"
Today, church planting has reached an all-time high with approximately 4,000 new churches planted every year in the United States, according to the "State of Church Planting USA" study. Church plants are also starting out with larger crowds with hundreds joining the first worship service, and the survival and success rate of church plants is at 68 percent.
One of the biggest trends in church planting today is the multiple venue church, or the multi-site church. The idea is that one church meets in multiple locations which are fed video satellite preaching from the main church campus.
Dave Ferguson, pastor of Community Christian Church, is expanding outreach and already transitioning from a multi-site church to a "poly-site" church – reproducing different kinds of campuses to reach different kinds of people – where the mission becomes the priority rather than just reproducing the same church, he said.
While some believe the large church trend will soon die out, Warren says the next generation of churches is going to be even bigger.
"They're going to be far larger than the boomer generation of churches because they're not limited to one campus anymore," he said in an interview featured on the Exponential Conference Web site.
Warren's Saddleback has planted over 40 independent "daughter churches" in Southern California and it recently launched a multi-site initiative with a goal of 10 campuses by the year 2010. According to Saddleback's multi-site church blog, its new campuses in Corona and Irvine drew 490 and nearly 2,000 attendants, respectively, to the first service.
"Reproduction is the mark of health," Warren commented.
Meanwhile, Alan Hirsch, co-founder of Shapevine and the founding director of Forge Mission Training Network which focuses on developing missional leaders in western contexts, believes church plants in America need to adopt a more missionary stance.
"I think here in America, I think church planting is still very bonded to church growth methodology and ideas," Australian-born Hirsch said in an interview featured on MondayMorningInsight, a Web site for pastors and church leaders.
"It (America) hasn't really thought through ... the nature of the church as a mission agency. We simply have to adopt a missionary stance in relationship to our culture," he continued. "We've got to break the monopoly that church growth thinking has over our mindset. Because unless we do that we'll never become a truly missionary agency."
The Exponential Conference featured other well-known speakers, including Tim Keller, founding and lead pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian; Ed Stetzer, former church planter and director of Lifeway Research; and Andy Stanley, senior pastor of North Point Community Church.
Comments
Warren has had a lot of critics in the Southern Baptist Church, frankly why he stays I don't know. However if his church did leave, the total IQ of the Southern Baptist Convention would drop by 20%....so i guess they do need him.
ronwilson4u "With rising corruption and growing tollerance for evil in the world"
there has always been corruption & evil in the world, always will be.
Every generation, for at least the last 500 years, it seems we have been peeling away everything we in our time thought was not really essential to the Gospel. We've thrown away everything the Church is supposed to mean, according to the Bible, and then peeled away everything the Bible was supposed to mean, except the part about our sins being forgiven, and us going to Heaven. Without a changed life, without a "new creature" except in God's imagination, without any kind of evidence to show the world that Jesus is any better than Larry Flynt, then what, really, do we have left? Is this the Gospel the martyrs died not to deny? So why did Jesus waste so much breath, and Paul, James, etc. so much ink, warning against things that don't really matter? Could it be that passages like Romans 6, Hebrews 12, Ephesians 1 & 2, 1 Thessalonians 5, etc. don't speak of a faraway ideal, but a normal life in Jesus? Could it be that when the Bible says our sins are nailed to the Cross, that's what it means, and not just the price tag? Could the Father have sent the Spirit with the authorisation to enable us to live godly rather than just hide our sins and wait to die? Could it be that we can regain that boldness and confidence promised in the New Testament? The more I read that Book, the more I think it means just that. If we're going to make a difference, then we're going to have to let God make a difference in us!
With rising corruption and growing tollerance for evil in the world, its not surprising Christian churches are declining. A recent Gallup poll reported 8 out of 10 Americans claim their faith has ties to Christianity; but, many people will claim to be Christians even if they are not practicing Christianity. Church attendance is a vital part of my Christian faith, and I encourage all Christians to become devoted to a Christian fellowship.
Hope Page: itsallaboutjesusnotme.blogspot.com