DAWN Fridayfax 1999 #36

USA

Barna calls America's churches to radical change

According to Dr. Jack Dennison, President of CitiReach, the USA has some 375,000 churches. Less than 3% of them are mega-churches with an attendance over 1,000, 25% are 'family churches' with between 200 and 400 members, and most of the rest (over 50% of all Protestant churches) are small neighborhood churches with long-term members from the pre-war and war generations (Seniors and Builders) who have little contact with their modern surroundings. These churches are often characterized by "the classic 3 P's of traditional churches: Pastor, Program and Problems" (Wolfgang Simson) and typically have less than 100 members, according to researcher George Barna. In his new book "The Second Coming of the Church", Barna describes the USA's existing churches as losing influence and members faster than any of the nation's other large institutions. "The systems, structures, institutions and relationship networks for spreading churches are archaic, inefficient and ineffective, maybe even unbiblical," he writes, and estimates that the churches in the US have 5 years to turn the ship around, or they will vanish into irrelevance.

Baptists realistic - we will never reach America this way

Many ask "Why do we need more churches? Isn't it enough to revitalize the existing ones?" Dr. Charles Chaney, leader of the Southern Baptists, answers: "The existing churches cannot win America for Christ, even if they suddenly wake up and become evangelistically active. That also means that America won't be reached by more of the same sort of church that we already have."

Planting tens of thousands of 'Go churches'

"In the past," says Dennison, "when we heard the word 'church', we always thought first of a building, an address and a time: 'We meet in the XYZ-church on Smith Street at 10am every Sunday'. This 'come' mentality must be changed," he continues, "and we must return to the dynamism of the early church, which was a 'go' church. It didn't bring people to church, but took the church to the people. That's why we need a completely new house- and cell-church movement which plants tens of thousands of 'go' churches in as many houses and neighborhoods as possible..."
Source: Charles Chaney, Jack Dennison, CitiReach, PO Box 63120, Colorado Springs, CO 80962-3120, USA. Fax (+1)-719-548-9619. E-mail: Dennisonjl@cs.com; George Barna (www.barna.org)

Canada

Catching up with global evangelical church growth

The aim of "Church Planting Canada", the nation's DAWN movement, is to mobilize all churches to saturate the nation by planting 10,000 new fellowships by the year 2015. One of the movement's recent reports showed that 38 of the nation's 54 denominations planted churches between 1992 and 1997, 13 shrank and 3 remained stable. A national strategy conference is being held in Ontario from 15-17 November 1999. Speakers include Bob Logan, Yonggi Cho, John Worcester (Purpose Driven Ministries) and Dr. George Hill, founder and leader of Victory Churches International, a Canadian church-planting movement which has started some 300 churches all over the world since its inception in 1978. With 31 new churches between 1992 and 1997, it is also one of Canada's leading church planting movements, together with Vineyard Churches, which grew from 20 to 59 fellowships in the same period. For the first time, a Lutheran church - the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod Canada - is also high in the church planting ratings. Canada's church planting rate (annual increase in the number of churches) has increased from 1.1% to 1.3% in recent years; figures for the period following the nation's first DAWN Congress in November 1997 are not yet available, but are expected to be higher. Globally, evangelical churches are expanding at a rate of 4.5% per year, over 2.5 times as fast as the 1.7% population expansion. In order to reach the target of 10,000 new churches by 2015, Canada's church planting rate must also increase to 4.5%. A growing number of Canadian Christians consider this possible.
Source: Outreach Canada, 7201-72nd Street (Unit 2), Delta, BC V4G IM5, Canada. Fax: (+1)-604-502-1667

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