Yesterday I spent some time talking about “What is a Missional church”. Today I am going to look at this question Are our churches failing. Today I will show you alot of statistics that I learned at my conference.
I was absolutely amazed to learn that is takes 86 church members to reach one person for Jesus Christ. Why is that. We feel we have the message of salvation that will save someone from an eternity in hell yet we fail to share this news.
In addition only 41-43% of Americans say they attend church on a given weekend. They key here is 41-43% say the truth is that only 17.5% percent of Americans actually attend church on any given weekend. The fact is that over 85-94% of our churches are non growing. In the past decade alone the U.S. population has increased by over 10% while the U.S. church population has decreased by 9.5 percent. So when we hear that there is a church on every street that just is not true. The population is literally outgrowing our churches. If you do the path the church is in nearly a 20% deficit.
91 million people live in the U.S. who did not live hear 18 years ago. 70 million of them are under that age of 17, 23 million of them are immigrants. No one single state in U.S. has maintained a level of church growth that has kept up with its populations growth. In addition to this not one single county in U.S. reported more people attending church than 10 years ago. In the U.S. alone there are between 160-180 million unchurched people.
Here is the real kicker to this. over 17 million of those people 11% would come to faith in Jesus Christ if someone would tell them how. This is unbelievable that 17 million people just need to be told how and yet we say nothing. What’s more is that another 43 million 27% are almost ready to accept Christ as Savior.
Often we are afraid that people will reject us or get mad at us for sharing the gospel. The real truth is that only 5% of the unchurches would be considered antagonistic or hostile toward the church. Yet with all of these fact still 90% of our church members will never share their faith. Only 21% of our active members will invite anyone to church in a year, and only 2% will invite an unchurched person to church.
I strongly believe that the congregation will follow its leadership, that is why this next stat breaks my heart. In a recent study 54% of pastors had not shared their faith in the last 6 months. More than 80% of the unchurched said they would go if only someone would invite them. Yet at the same time more than 80% of the unchurched said they have never been invited to church. Yet at the same time 86% of people attracted to church come because of a personal contact with a church member.
What are we doing wrong? Is there and answer for this apathy that is so prevalent. Come back tomorrow as I share “What we can do”, The Most effective evangelistic methodologies.