16
Oct
2013
Does Your Church Feel the Need for Church Planting?
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How does your church feel about the need for new churches? Sometimes statistics can help out our feelings. Consider these simple statistics briefly:
- The population of the United States, the third most populous nation in the world, is about 316,700,000.
- The population of the United States is growing by 0.9% per year.
- This means we are adding a net of about 2,800,000 people per year (rounding down to the nearest 100,000). That only includes documented increases. (source: World Factbook)
Conclusion: If we only wanted to plant one church for every increase in, say, 10,000 people, Gospel-preaching churches need to plant 280 churches per year to keep up with the population growth rate alone. I think we would all agree to the need for new churches even without the growth in population, but with it, the stewardship of the gospel becomes all the more important.
May God burden us with the need and help us take the steps to meet the need for new churches!
Hi,
Yet, when Jesus told Paul He had many people in Corinth (population > 200K), He only wanted one church to reach all of them (Acts 18:10-11, 1 Cor. 11:18).
In other words, one church, obeying apostolic ecclesiology, can better reach a large city than many.
In our pragmatism to reach people for Christ have we traded away the unity of the body of Christ in every locale – a visible unity that Jesus wanted to display to the world (John 17:21-23)?
http://www.churchsonefoundation.com/the-local-body-of-christ/
Hi Pearson,
I am agree with you as with increasing of population in USA there is also need of planting of church with studies of Bible.
Because of the immigration/migration into our country the mission field has come to us. So it is not just planting churches, but planting churches among the different people groups that are now inside our borders. Reaching the different peoples here does help send the gospel overseas to that particular people.
It is not enough just to plant churches, but we must look for, pray for, be sensitive and even strategic to the opportunities we have to plant churches among those who are not like us.