We Need More Churches...

I was fortunate to be a part of a Vision Meeting last week to discuss the necessity of church planting within our state. The primary focus of our discussion was the Southwest portion of the state. While many people who live outside of the state of Virginia would consider us to be a very "churched" society, the statistics prove something quite different. If you look at Wythe County alone you will discover that almost 67% of our neighbors are not being reached by the church.

If that statistic alarms you...GOOD! It needs to alarm you. In fact, I hope that it will alarm other people as well. Too often, church planting seems like an ultra competitive game. I have heard people in established churches ask: "Why do we need another church in our community?" To put it bluntly - new churches see far more conversions than established churches. Not only that, but the truth is that there aren't enough churches to handle the population. The study of our area revealed how many churches are needed in order to have a MINIMUM of 1 church for every 2000 households (4000-5000 people). I thought this was a pretty amazing standard considering that we don't have any 1 church in the county (that I'm aware of) that has 4-5000 members. Are you starting to get the picture? We need a greater presence of the Body of Christ within our communities.

While I am a huge proponent of church planting, I'm not in favor of simply mass producing what we already have in existence. Let's face it, if what we had was already working then we wouldn't need anything else. And what this community needs (as well as others) are churches that are relevant, saturated in God's unconditional love, practiced in a "Culture of Honor", dependent upon the power of the Holy Spirit, grounded in the Word of God, passionate about worship, and determined to fulfill the Great Commission. With that being said, don't think that a church planting movement means that we will see the countryside littered with buildings. The fact is, these new churches may reside in homes, meet in school buildings, or gather in store fronts. Most of them will be considered contemporary non-traditional churches because that is what works for this generation. The music will sound different, the preaching style will be different, the way they dress will be different, and the Bible they preach out of will probably be different as well.

The bottom line in this discussion is that we will not see a change in these numbers until the church does what it was placed upon this earth to do. We are to be advancing the kingdom of our God into the kingdom of darkness. We are to be destroying the works of the enemy. And we are to be calling people out of that darkness and into His marvelous light. Are you ready? The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. I'm praying right now to the Lord of the harvest to send laborers out into His field.

How do we make this a reality? There is only one proven method: churches planting churches planting churches...etc.
We (the church community) will have to change our mindset. We will have to make a decision to say that bigger is not always better. We will have to sacrifice some "good members" to populate a church plant that will reach these communities. And each of us will have to ask if we need to be involved.

The Good News? We can change the statistics!!! We can make a difference!!! We can be a part of the mass salvation of our communities!!! These are exciting times.