THE NEED FOR NEW CHURCHES [Organic CP #2]

Like any living organism, every local church has a natural life cycle. Unless a church is able to reproduce itself in every new generation, it will go through a natural life cycle and die in one generation.

Right now in the U.S., there are approximately 340,000 churches [note: this is undoubtedly outdated. I don’t have the most recent figures, but due to the emphasis by Bill Bright and others such as DAWN, there has been an effort to plant house churches over the last four years. Plus, there is evidence that large numbers of people have stopped going to organized church services and have started meeting at home with the family and a few friends]. Three fourths of these churches are slowing dying and one fourth is growing[2]. Almost all of the increases of the 25% that are growing are transfers from the 75% that are diminishing.

Over the last twenty years, more than 3500 churches have closed their doors annually.[3] That translates to about ten churches shutting down every day. Only half as many are currently being started. Planting new churches in the U.S. is essential. If there is not a major focus on effective church planting, Christian faith in the U.S. may quickly become as culturally marginal as it is in Europe.

C. Peter Wagner has said that church planting is the most effective form of evangelism. Extensive research by Christian Schwarz of over a thousand churches in thirty-two nations shows that smaller and newer congregations are far more effective in evangelism than large churches. According to Schwarz, numerous churches far excel a single mega-church in evangelistic fruitfulness; “If instead of a single church with 2,856 in worship we had 56 churches, each with 51 worshippers, these churches would, statistically, win 1,792 new people within five years—16 times the number the mega church would win. Thus we can conclude that the evangelistic effectiveness of mini-churches is statistically 1,600 percent greater than that of mega churches.”[4]

If our prime directive is to make “disciples of the nations,” by persuading the unbelieving to trust and follow Christ, we must consider church planting as a mandate. If the church in the United States desires once again to be “salt and light” to U.S. culture, a sustained church planting movement must be launched. It must be the kind of church planting movement that easily and rapidly reproduces itself. If such a movement is to have a major impact on our society, it must not be “resource intensive” requiring multiple 10’s or 100’s of thousands of dollars and highly trained specialists to succeed. The term “organic” church planting communicates the image of something that spontaneously multiplies under natural conditions.

If the church in the U.S. is to continue to flourish in the future, we must also place an urgent priority on church planting among young adults. If the statistics are alarming about the pace of new church planting compared to dead and closing churches, the explosion of youth culture and the relative absence of a Christian influence is even more alarming. No where is the need for new churches more acute than among the millennial and Gen-X generations.