» 2008 » April

David Olson has been keeping track of 200,000 US churches. This is what he has discovered:

Less than 20% of Americans regularly attend church — half of what the pollsters report.American church attendance is steadily declining.Only one state (Hawaii) is growth in church attendance outpacing population growth.Mid-sized churches are shrinking; the smallest and largest churches [...]

The Christian Century has some bad news for the US church. . .

Every year about 3,700 churches close their doors in the US. That’s one in one hundred churches. That makes 3,700 new churches required each year in the US just to maintain the status quo—if you forget about population growth.

Now for the good news [...]

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern* world than are faithful to Christ, we have [...]

A new book on Emergent, the “left-wing” of the emerging church: Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck

You can visit the book’s website, download sample chapters and watch an interview of the authors.

Here’s another interview of the authors on Darryl’s blog.

The reviews on Amazon have been [...]

The estimated cost of repairing all England’s 14,500 listed places of worship is almost £1,000,000,000 over the next decade – and that doesn’t include thousands more unlisted ecclesiastical buildings.

The bill is almost three times what the parishes, by the most optimistic calculation, could possibly raise. The statutory charity, the Churches Conservation Trust, will be able [...]

Have a look at the correlation between number of churches started and growth in numbers of people in these figures from the Queensland Assemblies of God.

Let’s pop across to the UK where Peter Brierley tells the same story:

Now to the US and the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) one of the rapidly declining mainline churches. . .

There [...]

Following up on Ignoring that Pentecostal ‘gender paradox’, It seems an evangelical-pentecostal faith will not only change your marriage, it will change your whole life—for the better.

Here’s a comment from David Martin, distinguished sociologist in his review of David Smilde’s Reason to Believe, Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism
Years of skilful interviewing by David Smilde [...]

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I’ve been collecting historical and statistical data on church planting in Australia for the next1000 initiative.

It’s scary.

Not just the findings. . . . What is really scary is the flight from reality by so many denominations. They are intentionally that are hiding from the reality of their decline. Not only do they hide the data [...]

Do ever do presentations? Use Powerpoint?

It’s hurting you not helping you.

I love presentationzen. It will show you how to use Powerpoint (or if you’re on Mac, Keynote) to enhance your presentation rather than distract from it.

That’s the blog. Now there’s the book and it’s a gem. The best you can buy on how to create [...]

Here’s a podcast from Mark Driscoll. It will give you an insight into an emerging church planting movement and its founder.

While you’re there check out Mark Driscoll on why he has distanced himself from the non-Evangelical wing of the Emerging Church.

But to really understand the true power of Mark’s ministry listen to this message on [...]