Gospel.com Blog

How would you go about planting a church where there are no churches and are no Christians?

For many Christians living in the Western world, this situation is almost inconceivable: we’re surrounded by churches on all sides. Even in the least churched areas of the country, there are still a few scattered across the landscape.

A recent Lausanne pulse article by Younoussa Djao details some of the philosophy that goes into planting new churches in new places. He identifies seven tenants that one can use as a guide for understanding where and how to plant a church:

I. Go Where Jesus Is about to Go
II. Make Sure to Pray!
III. Look for the Person of Peace (from Luke 10:5-8)
IV. Either Do Your Ministry through the Person of Peace or Leave
V. Respond to the Needs: Compassion Ministries
VI. Give the Word of God by Doing Discovery Bible Studies
VII. Start Churches that Multiply

Out of those seven ideas, the fourth is the most interesting to me and almost seems counterintiutive. Here are Djao’s comments:

When a person of peace is not found in a community or an area, Jesus said to not do anything—to just leave. It means that it is not a place where Jesus is about to visit; God is not at work there; it is not God’s time for that place. Leave, pray more, and plan to come back later.

Sometimes a missionary will spend years in one place without seeing anyone interested in what he or she has to say or do. We spiritualize that by saying he or she is sowing and someone else will come and harvest.

The article is filled with insights and if you’re interested in global missions, it’s well worth your time to give it a read.

Did you happen to catch Answers in Genesis’ “State of the Union” address last week? It presented some very interesting facts about why and when people leave the church and the Christian faith.

You can watch it online here. Answers in Genesis is a creationist ministry, and that worldview is certainly the centerpoint of their address; but no matter what beliefs you hold about evolution and creation, you’ll find some of the research results fascinating. Here’s a few bullet points, taken from Kent Shaffer’s excellent Church Relevance blog:

Among 20- to 29-year-old evangelicals:

• 95% attended church regularly during elementary school
• 95% attended church regularly during middle school
  
>> 40% first had doubts about the Bible in middle school
• 55% attended church regularly during high school
  
>> 43.7% first had doubts about the Bible in high school
• 11% attended church regularly during college

  >> 10% first had doubts about the Bible in college

Oddly, the study discovered that those who attended Sunday school (61%) are actually more likely than non-attendees (39%):

• to not believe that all the accounts and stories in the Bible are true
• to doubt the Bible because it was written by men
• to defend keeping abortion legal
• to accept the legalization of gay marriage
• to believe in evolution
• to believe that good people don’t need to go to church

The take-home point seems to be that America’s Sunday schools and church youth education programs are failing to address kids’ serious spiritual issues until it’s too late and they’ve already left the church. While most youth ministry seems to focus on high school and college students, the above data suggests that it’s in middle school that doubts and spiritual crises kick in. And clearly Sunday school isn’t helping resolve those crises.

Kent’s post has some good thoughts and questions about these numbers. What do you think? Are these numbers a surprise to you?

Two new sites from Fireproof ministries are now live! Fireproof is the ministry behind XXX Church and they launched a few new sites in the past month.

The first is for their church out in the heart of Las Vegas called Strip Church. Recently, a number of the people from Fireproof moved out there to start this church on the Las Vegas strip. You can already read stories of how they’re reaching out and bringing the light of Christ to a city that so often revels in its own depravity.

The second site is for Fireproof Serve. If you’ve ever wanted to be involved in the ministries of Fireproof, this site is for you. Here you can read about the impact their ministry is having and sign up to go on a trip yourself. Activities range from handing out water and Bibles to thirsty people, to praying and talking with real people with real problems. All they ask is that you come ready to serve. If you even have an inkling of interest, head over and read more about the experience.

How would you react if your church closed its doors? What if it your church was the same one that you’re parents had gone to and their parents before them?

It’s a situation that many small rural churches are facing: what to do when there’s just not enough money or interest to stay open?

A recent blog post from Youth Specialties addresses the issue (the comments section is particularly interesting) and today, GetReligion highlighted the exact same sobering story from Minnesota where a 118 year old church shut its doors:

Carol Porter, 63 and no word mincer, sits in her modest kitchen in Euclid, Minn., and recalls the day her 118-year-old church was burned to the ground. “I was baptized, confirmed and married there,” she reports. Her family had moved two lots down from Euclid’s First Presbyterian, so she was able to watch through the kitchen window a few years ago as fellow parishioners knocked down the church, buried its fixtures and then put a match to what remained, sending a thousand Sundays of memories up in smoke.

America’s rural congregations, thinned by age and a population drain that plagues much of farm country, have gotten too small and too poor to attract pastors. No pastor means no church.

When so many of your religious experiences are intertwined with a building and community, the loss of those can be hard to bear. That’s why ministries devoted to the life of the small town church like Village Missions are important. They reach out to a community that many would like to ignore.

This video from Village Mission shows the importance of churches in these communities during tragic circumstances and asks the question, “What would happen if this church had closed?”

Is student ministry worth the immense amount of time, energy, and money that churches and dedicated ministries put into it? Aren’t many young people apathetic toward spiritual issues, or inclined to abandon the faith once they leave their family and church community?

While there’s a grain of truth to these conceptions, student ministry nevertheless remains a crucial part of the church’s call to evangelism. Making the case for student ministries are five articles over at the Lausanne World Pulse’s recently redesigned website:

• Why Bother with Student Ministry? Five reasons why Christian ministry among students is so important.
• The Strategic Importance of Student Ministry: What Are You Living For? There are things common to university students that make ministry among them a valuable use of time.
• Is Student Ministry Important? Student ministry is most strategic for the mission of God. It has always been so.
• Claiming Back Our Campuses for Christ: An Example from South Africa: In order to turn the tide of moral decay South Africa is rapidly heading toward, the Church should invest in children, youth, and young adults.
• Reaching Future Leaders through Word and Deed: One international church is reaching out to graduate students who are highly intellectual and skeptical of faith issues.

The LWP site is full of other excellent articles about church and ministry topics, and they’re regularly adding new content. If the above articles are useful to you, look through their online archives and stop back periodically to see what’s new!

The Intersect Community provides training for church leaders. Recently, on their blog, Steve Argue wrote about the drinking age and how it relates to youth ministry in the United States.

Here’s an excerpt in which he writes about how the current drinking age has made a new way for people to transition between childhood and adulthood:

Historically, adolescences has shifted from a time of “transition” from child to adult, to a significant life stage that some experience well into one’s mid-twenties. There are many developmental and sociological reasons for this phenomenon.

It has been perpetuated, not the least, by youth ministry that has (on plus side) responded to the needs of this population but may also be (on the negative side) perpeduated a delayed entry into adulthood.

More broadly, it might be said that the road from childhood to adulthood has lost its way as adolescence is desired, worshiped, and longed to be preserved.

The lack of “signposts” toward adulthood have left gaps for other rites to be adapted. I wonder if the 21 year-old drinking age has become one of these rites. Maybe this rite has had to take on a flood of meaning that, on the surface, shows itself as binge drinking, but underneath calls for something more.

Hop on over to enter into the discussion on this topic.

Have you ever wondered what kind of thought and planning goes into choosing the songs you sing (and sometimes play) in a worship service? If you’re a worship leader, do you have a solid, Biblical system for thinking through and choosing music pieces that fit each church service?

The process of selecting worship music will be different for each individual congregation and worship style, of course. But to help you think through your music choices, FarsiPraise has collected some thoughts on the matter from a variety of church and worship leaders (both are in PDF):

• An essay by Paul Oakley (of the Church of Christ the King in Brighton, England) that walks through seven steps for considering and choosing worship music.
• A second collection of short mini-essays by seven other church leaders explaining how they choose music for their churches.

If you’re a church leader struggling to pick the right music, these thoughts from other leaders might help. And if you’re a congregation member who’s always wondered who chose the music and why, they might give you some insight into an important part of weekly worship planning!

What causes a church to grow? And if your church or ministry is considering “planting” a new church, what will cause it to take root and flourish?

Those are big questions, and the answer certainly involves a lot of prayer, strategic planning, and wise leadership. But on a more fundamental level, there is a critical relationship between church growth and the Bible. An article at the Lausanne World Pulse argues that whether you’re a church worker or a missionary, it’s important to understand that there is a strong relationship between church growth and the Bible:

To plant or grow a congregation, two basic things must repeatedly occur: people must come to know Jesus and they must become members of his body. The first step can happen in an evangelistic instant. It is the miracle of faith born during a gospel presentation. What follows is most effectively accomplished through an intentional program of Bible study. House churches, cell groups and small groups are used to incorporate new believers. At the center of each one is a time of Bible study.

The article goes on to list seven specific ways that a program of Bible study strengthens a church and helps it expand. Certainly something to keep in mind—the questions of logistics, money, and leadership are all of obvious importance in growing or planting a church, but at the heart of your church’s success lies the Bible, and the willingness of your church to delve into it.

This week at Gospel.com, we’re asking an important question: what does it mean to be part of the church, the body of Christ?

The Bible makes it clear that interaction with other believers is an important part of the life of a Christ-follower. While you could certainly follow Christ in isolation from other believers, our effectiveness as Christians increases when we work with one another. “Let us not give up meeting together,” we read in Hebrews; and elsewhere the community of Christ-followers is described as a body composed of many individual parts: “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ.”

So what exactly is a church, and what is it meant to accomplish? That’s a question we’ll be exploring at more length as the week goes on. But two articles by Richard Krejcir provide a good place to start the discussion. First up is What Your Church Can Look Like, which asks: what would an ideal, healthy, Biblical church look like, and what would it do?

What would your church look like if you took away the pastor(s), the music and worship, the buildings, the favored programs, the sacraments and ceremonies, as well as the events and Sunday School? What would you have left? The answer of what is left is what impacts and what resounds in your church, and is where your church’s health lies. Because doing church is not about the pastor, the observances, or the programs. It is about how we come to know and grow in Christ, connect with one another, and serve Him, both inside and outside of the church walls.

A church, then, is about helping its members worship God, grow in the faith, and serve Christ in their homes and communities. Is your church doing a good job of that, when you strip away all of its outward trappings? Krejcir goes into much more detail in a longer followup article, The Twelve Characteristics of the Healthy Church—it’s a lot to take in at first glance, but it’s well worth your time to walk through each of the twelve characteristics Krejcir lays out and ask how your church does (or doesn’t) embody them. And tune in later this week as we point to more articles about the church!

Is your church youth-friendly?

Most church members would probably answer “yes”—a typical church has some sort of youth ministry program and probably a few mission trips or other events for students to participate in. But beyond the presence of those programs, does your congregation do a good job of welcoming young people and students into the full body of the church?

An article at Legacy Youth Ministry Resources by Steve Miller looks at a recent study that asked 10,000 students to rate the ten factors that most influence their commitment to church. The results are worth considering and not always what you’d expect—high-tech entertaining worship and music rank much lower on the list than compelling teaching and good old-fashioned quality relationships with the pastor and other church leaders.

Next up is an essay at StudentSoul.org about helping students get to church—there’s a lot your church can do to help students physically get to church, and once they’re there, to help them get connected to what your ministry is all about.

Take a look through these articles and ask yourself how your church would rate against these criteria. And if you want to do a bit more reading on the topic, see Youth Ministry Exchange’s review of Choosing Church: What Makes a Difference to Teens, a book that delves much more deeply into the question of “what attracts young people to a church?”