This week's message is based on a Pastor's Renewal Retreat that I was able to attend. We looked at a lot of statistics about where the church really is, and I found it encouraging. This week we look at those statistics, along with what we should be doing from here. This message is based on 2 Timothy 4:1-5.
Sandy and I had an opportunity to go down to The Cove, which is the Billy Graham Training Center in Asheville, NC. We went to one of the Pastor Renewal Retreats, they do five of these each year, and we met a lot of pastors down there who seemed to go to almost all of them. The Billy Graham ministry makes them available free to pastors and their spouses. It only cost $40 for our books and resources we would need. Even the food and lodging was taken care of. The topic for this one was Leading as Agents of Gospel Transformation, and the speaker was Ed Stetzer. Some of you may have heard of him, he is a pastor, and has planted a number of churches, with great success. He is currently the Chair of Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College, and serves as the Executive Director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton. He is a contributing editor for Christianity Today, a columnist for Outreach Magazine, Executive Editor for The Gospel Project, a discipleship curriculum used by over a million people each week. He is an Executive Editor for Facts & Trends a Christian leadership magazine with over 70,000 readers. He is the co-host of BreakPoint this week, a nationwide radio program. And on top of all that, he is an interim pastor of Moody Church in Chicago. And somehow, with all that going on, he has managed to write 16 books, with his latest coming out in September. What really impressed me about this is that Ed Stetzer is a researcher at heart. And so we talked a lot about the statistics of where the Church really is today. And we’ve all heard statistics that suggest the church is in a pretty bad way, that things are really grim. Maybe you’ve even heard that the church is dying, on it’s last legs. But I was really encouraged by what I heard, because I’ve heard all those statistics, too. And it’s easy to get discouraged when you hear them. But they aren’t true. The Church isn’t dying. The Church isn’t doing great – but it isn’t dying. So this morning we’re going to look at some statistics that show how the Church is really doing, then we’ll look at our mission moving forward – what should we be doing to move forward. So let’s get started with some statistics. First, something that I’ve heard at an ABC Home Mission training event on Missional Churches. We were told that back in the 30-40’s, that about 70% of the population went to church. In the 50-60’s, that number had dropped to about 40%. In the 80-90’s, down to 30%. And that today we are actually somewhere between 15-20% that actually go to church. That’s a pretty troubling statistic. The problem is, it isn’t true! The reality is that Church attendance has been holding steady at between 20-25% since the 1930’s. Now we’ve all heard the statistics that show that about 80-90 % of people believe in God, or a god. Here’s a better way to break down those numbers.
Now the thing is, that last group has always been about 25%. Statistically, the number of people attending church has been pretty steady since the 1930’s, there have been some bumps in the 50’s and the 80’s, but there was never a time in our country where 70-80% of people went to church. Those stats are just wrong. Now the number of people claiming to be Christian, while it was 80-90%, has been dropping. Today only about 70-75% say that they are Christian, and that number has been dropping about 1% a year since the 80’s. But understand this, they were never really Christians. They were the Cultural Christians who said they were Christian because they weren’t anything else. They never went to church. Now secular is a choice, and they are going with that. But the percentage of people going to church isn’t really changing. Now we can look around our church and see that a lot of people aren’t here anymore. That’s another issue that we’ll touch on later. But the important message is that the church overall, the big C Church, is still doing okay, and is likely to continue doing okay. So what’s going to happen in 50 years? The Cultural Christians are aligning with the secular people more and more. That’s probably going to continue at its current rate, and in twenty years or so, there probably won’t be any more. But remember they only claimed to be Christian because they weren’t anything else. They didn’t believe the gospel, they didn’t live by faith, they never had any faith. They were Christian because years ago Christian was the in thing. The Congregational Christians will be aligning with the secular folks more and more, too. They are already beginning to. On major issues both the Cultural Christians and the Congregational Christians are beginning to side with the secular side more and more. So realistically, in 50 years, there probably won’t be any Congregational Christians anymore, either. There won’t be a huge group of people who claim to be Christian but really aren’t, like we see now. But I think maybe the most important thing to remember is that the category, the active Christian who has shaped their life around their faith, is still going to be pretty steady. Every serious researcher believes that there will still be about 20-25% of the population going to church. Even 50 years from now. The church will continue. Now a lot of churches are closing, those churches that refuse to change are eventually going to close. And new churches will be planted, and the Church (Big C, the body of Christ) will continue. I just did a quick internet search, and found that 3,700 churches closed in 2014. But over 4,000 new church plants were started that same year, so you could look at the number of churches that are closing and think the church is in trouble, but actually the Church grew. The purpose of this morning’s message is that the church isn’t dying. It’s changing. And those congregations that can find ways to change with it, and can avoid major conflict along the way, will be fine. There are some other statistics that we’ve probably all heard that Ed Stetzer said aren’t true. We’ve probably all heard that report that said that Christians get divorced at the same rate as everyone else. That faith doesn’t make a difference. But that’s not really true. When they asked the questions, they asked the Cultural and Congregational Christians as well, but they aren’t really Christians. So you would probably expect them to divorce at the same rate as everyone else. If you look at just the regular church goers, that statistic is only about half the nationwide average. Now I think that the bible is really clear about divorce, and that it shouldn’t be an option for a Christian, so half the national average is still way to high, but faith does make a big difference on the issue of divorce. Another one, you’ve probably heard that young people are leaving the church in droves. There’s a stat says that 86% (or 94%) of Christian young people leave the church. But actually, among college students, 32% claim to be religious, that is, they believe in God and attend services regularly. Another third considers themselves spiritual, but not religious. They think there is something else out there, but they aren’t believers. So young people aren’t leaving the church in droves, they are still religious. And a third are still actively attending church. Another stat you may have heard is that the American Church is at death’s door. Honestly, with all the stats you hear, you almost can’t help but think that. But the truth is, America is still a remarkably devout nation. According the book American Grace, by David Campbell and Robert Putnam, just under 40% of American’s claim to go to church weekly. Now we know that number is a little high, there is something called the halo effect, people want to look a little better than they really are, so they aren’t always really honest, but every nation has that, so we can still compare those results. That puts the US ahead of Italy, Canada, Britain, France, Russia, and Sweden in worship attendance. In fact, it even puts the US ahead of Iran. You might think of Iranians as a nation of very devout Muslims, but the truth is, there is a higher percentage of Americans in church every week than there are Iranians in a mosque every week. So the church in America is not dead. Don’t think it is. No real researcher anywhere believes the church in American is dying. So don’t buy into those bad stats. Most researchers believe that the church attendance will be about the same in 50 years as it is today, so that’s a good thing, right. The church hasn’t lost the battle. We aren’t really gaining any ground either. All is not lost, but we aren’t winning, either. So what do we do about it. First, we need to remember that we are supposed to be on a mission. Jesus’ last words should be our first priority, “Make disciples of all people.” You see sharing our faith isn’t just part of our calling, it is our calling. Jesus actually gave us four missions, and we tend to call one of them the Great Commission, and the other three are really jealous about that, so next week we’ll look at all four, but I’ll give you a little warning, we’ll find one focus. And that’s going to be the importance of sharing our faith. Evangelism is the calling of every disciple. And that’s what Paul told Timothy in his closing remarks in our reading this morning. And there is a lot of good stuff in there, but I want to concentrate on the last verse we read, “But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge the duties of your ministry.” Now something to understand here about Timothy, he was a helper of Paul, and he was a very devout believer, but he wasn’t a paid minister. Yet he was told to “Do the work of an evangelist.” I don’t think Paul is expecting Timothy to be the next Billy Graham. To quit his job and to just go anywhere people will listen and preach the gospel. But yet Paul tells him to do the work of an evangelist. What does that mean? What does that mean for us? Think about it this way, we are to do our work in evangelistic ways. That we should always be looking for opportunities to share our faith. Not that that should be our full-time job, but that as we do our full time job, we should be looking for opportunities to share. There are three things in that verse I want to look at, Action, Labor, and Focus. Do implies action. We have to do something. And doing the work of an evangelist means sharing what we believe. Billy Graham died in February, and the day before he actually died, they knew he was dying, and Ed Stetzer was one of those they had called, and so Ed and his wife Donna are going to fly down to Charlotte. They called for an Uber ride to the airport, and Jane the Uber driver shows up. And as they get into Jane’s car, they noticed some things a little unusual about this ride. First, there’s a bible in the back seat, think of the Gideon’s bible in hotel rooms, right. She makes a bible available to anybody that she gives a ride to that wants one. Next, as they are driving, she starts gently, and very unoffensively, directly the conversation toward spiritual things. Ed and Donna kind of look at each other, and Ed says quietly, “she’s trying to convert us!” Which had to be kind of funny. Ed Stetzer is one of the giants of the faith. Billy Graham is close to death and he’s the one they call. Or at least one of the people they call. They tell her that they are believers, and then he starts asking her a bunch of questions about what she does. She was a real estate agent, but the market was pretty slow, so she started driving for Uber to make a little extra money. And she found that having someone in your backseat kind of makes them captive for a little while, and you can share with them, as long as you’re not offensive and in their face about it, they’ll listen to what you have to say. Actually, among the younger unchurched, 89% claim they are willing to listen to someone tell them what they believe about Christianity. 61% are willing to study the Bible with a friend. And 46% are even willing to join a small group to learn more about the Bible and Jesus. So we tend to think people are hostile to the gospel, and that you can’t talk to them, but the truth is, most people really want to know more. They’re open to hearing more. We just need to tell them. We need to be gentle about it, we can’t shout it out on street corners, but they’ll listen if we do it with love. But we have to do it. We have to take action. So action is the do, we have to do something. Labor is the work. We have to do the work. And it will seem like work. We don’t naturally want to stick our necks out there to do this. We might get rejected, and nobody needs more rejection in their life. But it’s our mission. There is a story, a parable of the Lighthouse. There was once this small lighthouse on a rocky coast. It was pretty crude, and there was only one boat, but the members of this life saving station were dedicated. And if they saw a shipwreck, they went out, with no thought for their own safety, no matter how dangerous it was, they went out. Well they were so good at what they did, that eventually they became somewhat famous for saving lives. Some of those that they saved wanted to give back, and they joined, and they gave their money to support the work. Bigger and better boats were bought, new crews were trained, and the station grew. Eventually, some of the new members were unhappy with the small and somewhat crude building, so they built a new one, a big one, it was beautiful. It became a popular gathering place, sort of a clubhouse where you could relax and socialize. The members were no longer really interested in going out to sea anymore, so they hired crews to stand watch and man the boats. One day there was a particularly large shipwreck, and the hired crews brought back boatloads of cold, wet, half -drowned people. They were dirty, some of them were sick, some spoke strange languages, and the new club got really filthy. At the next meeting, the majority of the members voted to cease the club’s lifesaving activities – they were too unpleasant and they messed up the club house. It was too much of a hinderance to the normal life of the club. Shipwrecks are still frequent in those waters, but now most of the people drown. Unfortunately, that parable has way too many parallels to the church today. We’ve stopped doing the work. It is our mission, but we’ve stopped doing it. Among Protestant churchgoers, Lifeway Research found that 61% of protestants didn’t share their faith with anybody in the last six months. Another 16% shared just once. 9% shared just twice. If we add that up, we find that 86% shared their faith with just two or less people in the last six months. And the vast majority didn’t share with anybody. The Church has become a little too much like a life-saving station that doesn’t save lives. We need to do the work. Finally, we need focus. We need to do the work of an evangelist. We need to focus on evangelistic things, on sharing, on finding opportunities to let people know what we believe. We need to be intentional about sharing. The bible says, “he [God] has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19). We are God’s game plan. If you want to know how God is going to reconcile mankind to himself, you are His plan. He chose you. That’s the role of every believer. That’s our mission. We need to be more intentional about evangelism. At the Diaconate meeting, we talked about the need to get more intentional about discipleship, and we’re working on a plan to do that. So we’ll have classes on how to live life on mission, and what it means to be a disciple, and how we might be able to share our faith like Jane the Uber driver.
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