According to the Christian Post, the American Baptists are seeking to jumpstart their struggling association with a call to a “‘radical new form’ of ministry.”
The American BaptistAssociation has been through hard times lately, wrestling with doctrinal, practical, and spiritual issues. The whole southwestern constituency split from the Association a year ago.
A. Roy Medley, the general secretary of the Association, declared the need for a “righteous reboot” within the Association, beginning with the launch of New Life 2010. New Life 2010 is a missions project, seeking to produce 1,000,010 new Christians and 1,010 new churches by 2010.
We must re-imagine the church as ever-multiplying clusters of believers, each one shaped by its mission context, coming together with an intense sense of call to mission in worship style, in elements of ministry, and in the call to ministry in the community.
It seems that behind all the dramatic speech lies not a call to “reimagining” or “radical new forms of ministry,” but a call to renewed dedication to the pursuit of Christ and the furthering of His gospel.
Truthfully, Christianity does not need an exterior makeover. It needs internal, spiritual revival.
Ed Stetzer has an article in Outreach on the top reproducing churches in America. Accompanying the article is a list of the top 25. Here are the criteria behind the list:
A “Top 25” list was compiled by ranking the top 40 respondents using self-reported criteria, such as:
the total number of church plants over the life of the church
the average number of churches planted each year
dollars and percentage of budget dedicated to church planting
the number of daughter churches that have planted a new church
We also factored in a church’s influence on the entire church-planting community. This list is ultimately a celebration and an evaluation of what all these churches are doing to reach people with the Gospel.
ChurchRelevance points out a couple of helpful resources for getting demographic information. These sites contain a wealth of helpful data that churches and church planters should take advantage of.
PeopleGroups.info is a great new site that has detailed information (based on census data) about the nationality, spoken language, ancestry, race and ethnicity, and people group for just about every state, city, and neighborhood in North America. The site is sponsored by the North American Mission Board and the International Mission Board and is free for any evangelical Christian to use. This looks like a great resource for church planting and evangelism.
Devin Hudson, Lead Pastor of Grace Point Church in Las Vegas, has written a helpful piece for church planters.
Here’s the bottom line: if you plant a church with the primary desire to reach nonbelievers, STAY WITH THAT VISION. You will be tempted to change it, alter it, compromise it, adjust it, or even drop it. Don’t do it. Stay with it.
Jeff Straub, Associate Professor in Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, writes what is sure to be a controversial piece on church planting in the US.
The efforts of some church planters are little more than a preference for variety. Churches are planted, not because an area needs to be evangelized, but because a particular variety of church does not exist in a given locale. This raises a question. Is variety a suitable motive for church planting? . . .
When we consider the limited resources of our churches today, I wonder whether we should support the planting of new churches in Atlanta when there are whole countries with fewer churches than metro Atlanta. Whole countries! Can Atlanta really be considered unevangelized? I don’t see how. But many countries are unreached with the gospel. Indonesia, for one, and Yemen, for another, have little or no gospel presence. . . .
Arguably, some of the unevangelized countries are limited-access countries where a new church could not be planted even if we had the will to do so. But still, shouldn’t we look strategically at church planting? Granted that Atlanta has many lost people and that many of the existing churches are weak, does this mean that we should encourage men to go to Atlanta to plant churches? . . .
When we talk about church planting, let’s have a world perspective. The United States is the most evangelized country in the world. Atlanta is among the most evangelized cities in the world. Let’s plant churches—lots of churches. But let’s talk realistically about missions.
Sometimes, I fear our missions mindset boils down to little more than flavors of ice cream—“there isn’t an independent, fundamental, premillennial, ___________ (fill-in-the-blank with your essential adjectives) church in this community; therefore, it needs a(nother) new church.
Ken Davis, director of church planting at Baptist Bible Seminary (Clarks Summit, PA), gives ten reasons that the church must be involved in planting other churches.
1. Huge numbers of unchurched North Americans call for new churches.
2. The number of churches in our land has actually decreased in proportion to our overall population.
3. New churches reach lost people better than any other form of evangelism.
4. The older most churches grow, the less evangelistic many become.
5. Many established churches are now in survival mode and will eventually close.
6. Half of all people in the U.S. and Canada live in just 43 cities with populations of over one million.
7. New churches are needed to reach the growing number of ethnic people in North America.
8. Today’s churches are not reaching today’s young people.
9. Our children and grandchildren need churches with room for them to become responsible Christians and leaders.
10. Church planting will counteract the rise of false religions in North America.
According to the Christian Post, the American Baptists are seeking to jumpstart their struggling association with a call to a “‘radical new form’ of ministry.”
.
Ed Stetzer has 
