Barry Kang

In my last post on this series, I talked about the demographic need for more churches in this country. Why plant/launch a new church? Well, quite simply we need more churches in this country. There are not enough existing churches for everyone to attend in the United States. Currently, there is only one church for every thousand or so people in this country. Not every church can become a thousand member church. Nor would they want to be. So the answer to this problem is simple: we need more churches.

But this is not the best reason to plant new churches. An even better reason is this. As C. Peter Wagner (the famous missiologist) writes:

Planting new churches is the most effective evangelistic method under heaven.

He's not the only one saying this. Tim Keller (you could just skip this whole blog series and just listen to what he has to say), John Piper, Mark Driscoll (including the Acts 29 movement and The Gospel Coalition), Henry Blackaby, etc, agree that church planting is the most effective evangelistic method under heaven.

In other words, existing churches are NOT the best way to reach the 227 million unchurched people out there. New churches are. Dave Earley has compiled some astonishing statistics about this:

• “Today, of the approximately 350,000 churches in America, four out of five are either plateaued or declining . . . . Many churches begin a plateau or slow decline about their fifteenth to eighteenth year. 80-85 [percent] of the churches in America are on the down-side of this cycle. Of the 15 percent that are growing, 14 percent are growing from transfer, rather than conversion growth.”
• In the average year, half of all existing churches will not add one new member through conversion growth.
• One American denomination recently found that 80 percent of its converts came to Christ in churches less than 2 years old.
• “On a per capita basis, new churches win more people to Christ than established churches.”
• Churches over fifteen years of age win an average of only three people to Christ per year for every one hundred church members. Churches three years to fifteen years old win an average of five people to Christ per year for every one hundred church members, but churches under three years of age win an average of ten people to Christ per year for every one hundred church members.

Why would this be?

I think there are three reasons this would be so:

1. Survival: new churches are more desperate than established churches to reach out to the unchurched. If they don't grow, they'll soon disappear.
2. Flexibility: new churches are much more flexible than established churches because they are not bound by customs and traditions ("this is the way we do things around here"). New churches are more willing to try new things (see point 1).
3. Outward Focus: new churches are more likely to be outward focused rather than inward focused. Older churches have established congregations with legitimate needs that naturally become the focus. New churches do not have congregations so they have to go out and get them!

If we are serious about bringing the gospel message to the unchurched, then we need to plant new churches.

But as good a reason as this is to plant new churches, I'll talk about an even better reason to plant churches in my next post.