American "churchianity" is in serious trouble for two main reasons. First, most of our churches are on life support and are just a few more funerals away from closing the doors to their facilities. Second, only 4% of churches will plant a daughter church. That means that 96% of our churches are sterile. Even worse, many of the 4% that do give birth do so with an "unwanted pregnancy," which we call a church split.
Still, we have people saying, "We don't need more churches; we just need to improve the ones we have." Can you imagine making that kind of statement about our own species? "We don't need any more people; we just need to improve the ones that we have." This is short-term thinking that is selfishly sacrificing the future for the interests of the present.
We are only one generation from extinction if we don't have babies. This is undeniable.
If tomorrow headlines declared that 96% of American women are no longer fertile and could not have babies, we would know two things. First, this is not natural, so something is wrong with our health. Second, our future is in serious jeopardy.
That is the condition of the church in American right now. It is that serious!
I would agree that we do not need any more institutional churches with a business-as-usual, club member mentality. We have plenty of those. What we need are church planting movements led by missional churches that focus on penetrating lostness. We need the church to rediscover it's missionary identity and calling and to express this through kingdom-expansion church planting. Those who are saying we don't need any more new churches are assuming that kingdom expansion will happen primarily through existing institutional churches. I doubt that very much.
Posted by: Robby Partain | August 02, 2006 at 10:14 AM