This is an idea whose time has come. It is easy, simple, saves money, and I think it seeds the mission of God in N America for generations to come: STOP FUNDING TRADITIONAL CHURCH PLANTS and instead fund missionaries to inhabit contexts all across the new mission fields of N America.

Traditionally denominations have funded church plants. They do this by providing a.) a full time salary plus benefits for three years, and b.) start-up funds for equipment, building rental etc. to a well-assessed church planter (read entrepreneur). The goal is a self-sustaining church in three years paying its own pastor’s salary and assorted sundry costs of running the church’s services. The costs are astounding, perhaps 300-400,000 dollars or more to get a church plant going.

Today, in the changing environments of N American post Christendom, this approach to church planting is insane. For it not only assumes an already Christianized population to draw on , it puts enormous pressure on the church planter to secure already well-heeled Christians as bodies for the seats on Sunday morning. This in itself undercuts the engagement of the hurting, lost peoples God is bringing to Himself in Christ.

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Next year marks the one hundredth anniversary of Roland Allen’s small book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? In that landmark text in mission studies, Allen argued that Western missionary methods had little in common with Paul’s missionary practices in the New Testament. The apostle and his partners did not establish large, permanent institutions, nor did they stay in one place for a decade or a career.

Allen wrote during the height of Western optimism, paternalism, and colonialism, and it took time for his ideas to gain traction. Yet the book eventually grew in influence and helped spur the shift toward contextualization and indigenization in world mission.

David Fitch wants to do something similar for North American missions and church planting. Fitch is Lindner Professor of Evangelical Theology at Northern Seminary and the author of several books, most recently The End of Evangelicalism….

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Some will cite the 2003 General Convention, which approved the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop, as the turning point, and The Episcopal Church Annual again shows an important decline (see p. 21): we have lost more than 250,000 baptized members (from 2,284,233 to 2,006,343) and 325 parishes and missions (from 7,220 to 6,895). “Episcopal Congregations Overview” records that 89 percent of Episcopal congregations reported conflicts or disagreements in the last five years, and adds: “The ordination of gay priests or bishops was the most frequently mentioned source of conflict” (p. 3).

But the essential elements of decline began in the mid-1970s. In 1970, TEC had an all-time high of 3,475,164 members. Within five years, it had lost nearly half a million, down to 3,039,136 (Episcopal Church Annual, p. 21). In the four decades since then, we bled out more than one-third of our members. Some will blame this drastic period of anemia on divisions over women’s ordination, prayer book revision and even fallout from the civil rights movements of the 1960s, but it is probably not that simple either. A massive loss between 1970 and 1975 occurred before the height of divisions over women’s ordination and prayer book revision….

Our many-faceted attempts to scramble for some method that will recharge, reawaken and revitalize the church are simply not working. What are we to do?…

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Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston is a little like a small city, focused on nurturing a sense of community, delivering services and worshipping God.

Where most churches offer Bible study sessions that attract perhaps a couple of dozen people who meet in a classroom, Mount Moriah fills its 800-seat sanctuary Wednesday nights with people who want to learn about the Scriptures. Bible study becomes a mini-service….

Membership has surpassed 4,000 (with perhaps 3,200 considered active members), and its sanctuary no longer can accommodate everyone who comes to worship. A spillover room with a big video screen is regularly used.

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Having arrived at what they described as a “broad consensus”, representatives of 90 per cent of the world’s Christians have published guidelines on how to conduct relations with each other and with members of other faiths. It is an important step forward in relations between different Christian denominations, but its real significance may lie elsewhere. In many parts of the world Christians live cheek by jowl with other religions. Often they are a minority group. Violence is sometimes stirred up by troublemakers when Christians are accused of evangelising and seeking to convert others to Christianity. This has happened time and again in the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent.

In most cases the troublemakers are militant Islamists, but in India it has also occurred with militant Hindus. Such charges will be much easier to refute now these guidelines are in existence. They also provide ammunition for church authorities seeking to restrain the more zealous of their own members.

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How can the Christian Church, and more specifically Anglican churches, best make disciples in the 21st century through catechesis? That topic was the subject of the second Ancient Wisdom””Anglican Futures conference June 16-18 at Trinity School for Ministry.

“We need much more depth and breadth in the way we think of making disciples,” Philip Harrold, associate professor of Church history at Trinity, told The Living Church. “We need to rediscover ancient ways of reading Scriptures from the Fathers and the Reformers, and also the revivalists. We need to recover new ways of being the body of Christ formed around that Scripture.”

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The five-page code of conduct, which has been under negotiation since 2005, was unveiled at a Geneva news conference by the World Council of Churches (WCC), a senior Roman Catholic prelate and the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA).

It urges Christians wanting “to share the good news of God’s kingdom” — missionary work or simply publicly testifying to their faith — “to build relations of respect and trust with all religions” and adapt their approaches to local conditions.

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According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s figures, Knoxville, the see city of the diocese, has grown in population from 173,890 in 2000 to 185,100 in 2009. This represents a population growth of approximately 6.45% in this time frame.

According to Episcopal Church statistics, the Diocese of East Tennessee went from Average Sunday Attendance (or ASA) of 6,376 in 1998 to 5,649 in 2008. The finally released 2009 numbers shows a small further decline in ASA to 5645 in 2009. This represents an ASA decline of about 11.65 % over this eleven year period. Please note that if you go to the link toward the end of this sentence and enter “East Tennessee” as the name of the diocese and then “View Diocese Chart” underneath on the left you can see in pictorial form some of the data from 1999-2009.

Over 100 clergy and lay leaders attended the second offering of “The Future and Your Church” workshop, June 2, at the Church of the Redeemer, Orangeburg. They heard about the changing societal landscape churches face and what they can do to fulfill the gospel-mandate to make disciples while stemming the tide of declining church attendance and involvement.

“The world isn’t the way it used to be,” said the Very Rev. John Burwell, Rector of the Church of the Holy Cross, Sullivan’s Island and Daniel Island, during a presentation in which he used visuals to illustrate changes in culture. “What people want from their church is different. If we want our churches to thrive we can’t do things the way we used to do them.”

Bishop Lawrence told of the disturbing decline in average median Sunday church attendance in the Episcopal Church, from 74 in 2002 to 66 in 2009. “That statistic is stunning,” he said. “It used to be that a typical Episcopal congregation of 70 could afford a full-time clergy person…but because of demographics that’s becoming increasingly difficult. When you can’t afford a full time priest a church begins to just maintain. We work to keep the doors open, so someone’s here to bury me.”

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“Faith is not conserved by its own merits in the world, it is not automatically transmitted to the human heart, but must always be announced. To be effective the proclamation of faith must begin with a heart that believes, hopes, loves, a heart that loves Christ and believes in the power of the Holy Spirit!”

This was Pope Benedict XVI’s message to the bishops, clergy religious and laity of his diocese Monday evening, gathered together in the basilica of St John Lateran to open the annual convention of the Diocese of Rome.

The Holy Father called priests, parents and catechists to launch a new evangelisation, to transmit a living faith to the future generation of Romans and create a community of believers in the eternal city where the Gospel is not only preached but put into practice.

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The Anglican Church is making a radical bid for new recruits by holding Sunday services in a city cinema.

Evangelical Christian churches started the trend to hold services at movie theatres at Chadstone, Northland and Eastland.

And now a mainstream church is ”bringing the church to the people” by offering teenagers and young adults a Sunday morning choice – Hangover 2 or the word of God at Hoyts in Melbourne Central.

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One assumption [of this new model of ministry advocated by David Heywood] is that the church has ”˜fuzzy edges’, that there is an increasing spiritual awareness in the population at large, and that if people see the church engaged in worth-while activities (like cleaning up a pond at the heart of an estate) and offering meaningful worship they will want to get involved. Belonging, we are told, precedes believing.

Unfortunately I know many people who value the contribution the church makes to their community but simply do not believe the creed it teaches. On the odd occasion they do attend a service they are not impressed by the explanation offered for the Christian faith. Members of an established, national Church have difficulty accepting that they hold the creed of a minority.

”˜Back to church Sunday’ and other initiatives directed towards people on the fringes of the church or people who retain some kind of vestigial Christian faith are certainly important but serious involvement in mission demands an honest acceptance of the fact that millions of people in Britain do not believe the Christian faith. This means giving more attention to theology and philosophy and to the serious study of the culture. One of the dangers of the new model of ministry..is that it underestimates the importance of theology.

–Paul Richardson in this week’s Church of England Newspaper (requires subscription)

Before I get into that, lets look at a few quotes from the [parish] report, which acknowledges “a steady decline in attendance over the past 18 months” and “Overall, our participation numbers in children’s choirs has dropped dramatically since 2008, although a slight recovery appears to be underway.” I have to wonder if any of the report readers recognize the correlation between program and attendance/involvement. I won’t point out those correlations — I’ll just let you view them and hopefully comment.

Let me say, as an aside, that this parish is not unique at all within TEC. All over the US, Episcopal parishes are trying to figure out what on earth is going wrong. Parishes are declining in droves — and many of them are in death spirals. As I shared with someone recently [edited slightly]:

“I personally believe that TEC will continue to decline rapidly, and most of the “hinterland” parishes will die. That is certainly what is happening within my diocese. We’ll end up with some parishes in Greenville, Columbia, Aiken, one in Rock Hill [which is dying] and a couple in Spartanburg — and that will be it. Our “natural size” now in our diocese is around 12 functional/healthy parishes, with the rest on life support until the older generations die out. And I think that’s the level that dioceses of that size will eventually decline to over the next 10-20 years.”

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The spirit and example of Cyril and Methodius is not only to be praised as a piece of a bygone age.

“For the peoples of Europe,” said Poe Benedict, “these two great saints remind us that their unity” – the unity of Europe – “will be more solid if it is based on common Christian roots.” The Pope identified Christianity as a central and defining element in Europe’s complex history, and discussed how the Christian faith has shaped the culture of the Old Continent, saying that this faith, “is intertwined with its history,” to such a point that the history of Europe is not comprehensible without reference to the events that marked the first great period of evangelization, and the centuries in which Christianity assumed a growing role.

The Pope went on to discuss how, in the present day, Europeans are called to commit themselves to creating the conditions for a deep, cohesive and effective cooperation among peoples – a cooperation that cannot be based on an appeal to purely economic interests, but must rather rely on those authentic human goods​​, which have their foundation in universal moral law written on the heart of every man.

“It is important, therefore,” said Pope Benedict, “that Europe also grow in the spiritual dimension, in keeping with the best angels of the history,” of Europe’s peoples.

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For Ben baptism was all about making a commitment. He said: “The words that were said in the children’s baptism made me realise that you couldn’t be a Christian without making a commitment. It was a personal thing on one level, but it is also a public statement that you’re going to follow Christ.”

Shortly after he was baptised Ben started going to church every week and soon stepped into the role of Sunday School leader. He realised that he had very little knowledge about his faith and the Anglican church, so five years ago he enrolled on the Bishop’s Certificate (a course run by Southwell and Nottingham Diocese) and then trained as a Reader.

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St. Augustine says that “it was necessary for Jesus to say: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ (John 14:6) because once the way was known, it remained to know the goal” (Tractatus in Ioh,, 69, 2: CCL 36, 500), and the goal is the Father. For Christians, for each one of us, hence, the way to the Father is to allow ourselves to the guided by Jesus, by his word of truth, and to receive the gift of his life. Let us make our own St. Bonaventure’s invitation: “Open, therefore, your eyes, lend your spiritual ear, open your lips and dispose your heart, so that you will be able to see, hear, praise, love, venerate, glorify, honor your God in all creatures” (“Itinerarium mentis in Deum,” I. 15).

Dear friends, the commitment to proclaim Jesus Christ, “the way, the truth and the life” (John14:6), is the main task of the Church. Let us invoke the Virgin Mary so that she will always assist the pastors and those who in the different ministries to proclaim the happy message of salvation, so that the Word of God is diffused and the number of disciples multiplied

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With just over a year left before the Games come to the capital, churches are drawing up their plans for coordinated outreach and engagement during the Games.

David Willson, chief executive of More than Gold, the umbrella group for outreach during the Games, has coordinated church engagement in Sydney, Athens, Beijing and Vancouver.

He said there were more churches and agencies getting behind the London Olympics than with any other Games previously.

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…the church and its expansion into the East Village highlight a concerted groundswell of middle-class, professional evangelicals in Manhattan, an area many churches once shunned as an epicenter of sin. It is the place, many now believe, to reach the people who influence the world.

Though much attention has been paid to New York’s boom in immigrant churches, in recent decades the number of English-speaking evangelical churches south of Harlem has grown tenfold, to more than 100, said Tony Carnes, a researcher and founder of the online journal A Journey Through NYC Religions, who has studied New York churches since the 1970s. Without fanfare, the newcomers have created networks to pay for new churches and to form church-planting incubators, treating the city as a mission field.

Because the institutions are new, Mr. Carnes added, the city has become “like a Silicon Valley of church-planting.”

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When C.S. Lewis gathered with his colleagues in The Inklings to discuss their shared faith and latest endeavors, they met at a pub in Oxford called the Eagle and Child.

The parish hall of St. Alban’s Chapel at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge is larger than the Eagle and Child and it’s not serving draft beer, but the premise is similar: Gathering together for a meal and lively discussion of higher things.

The Rev. Andrew S. Rollins uses “Lunch with C.S. Lewis” to make some of the grand concepts of Christianity ”” the goodness of God, suffering, heaven and hell ”” accessible to an audience not limited to scholars.

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Without using the word, we were acknowledging that in such a context, we are multi-faith. When people of different faiths are found together, in a conference, neighborhood, or nation, they are best described as multi-faith, representing different faiths.

Worldwide trends indicate that multi-faith is both a current reality and our future. The number of people who claim adherence to the major world religions is growing. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and other post-Enlightenment thinkers predicted the death of God and the decline of religious belief over 100 years ago, but their predictions were premature. In fact, secular thinking has long embraced the idea that religion was the socio-political problem, not so much the solution.

If anything, “God is dead” has been replaced with “God is back.” Economists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, an atheist and a Roman Catholic, wrote a fascinating book in 2008 with that title. In it they noted that while statistics about religious observance are notoriously untrustworthy, most surveys seem to indicate that the global drift toward secularism has halted. Quite a few surveys show religious belief to be on the rise. They reference one source that says that “the proportion of people attached to the world’s four largest religions””Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism””rose from 67 percent in 1900 to 73 percent in 2005, and may reach 80 percent by 2025.”

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In February 2006 a band of people reportedly hired to kill me came to my house. Believing that I was there although I was in another country, they tortured my wife, Gloria, from 1:30 to 3:30 a.m. They left Gloria half-dead and blind. Our son Rinji was left unconscious and our little boy Nanminen had a broken mouth. Through the miracle of medical science, Gloria healed thoroughly and regained her sight in five months.

The next year the attackers were back: this time they met me. They took me downstairs to the field outside my house, where they were going to kill me. They changed their minds and decided they would rather kill me in my bedroom. They brought me back to my bedroom and I pleaded with them for an opportunity to pray. They agreed and I got on my knees to pray. A few minutes later my wife was holding my hands in prayer.

A few more minutes later my son Rinji walked in. I screamed at him, “What are you doing? Why are you here?” He said, “Daddy, they’ve gone.” We got up and brought the whole family together and we praised the Lord until the police and the soldiers came, and throughout the day it was a song of praise.

Read it all (or watch the video which was posted a while back).

Anglican Communion members worldwide with access to the Internet can now take advantage of 90 evangelism resources on the Communion’s website here.

The resources were pooled after the Kuala Lumpur meeting of the Communion’s Evangelism and Church Growth Initiative’s core organising body. That the resources were selected by practitioners working in very different contexts in different countries means core group members are certain that visitors to the website will find some resources appropriate for their context.

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Officials of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina affirmed this month their sovereignty and discussed the need to encourage growth by starting new congregations.

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The Anglican Ordinariate which aims to be established in Australia by Pentecost is about evangelising, not preserving some pure form of Anglicanism, one of its leading figures said, reports the Record.

Bishop Harry Entwistle of Perth (pictured), one of 50 disaffected Anglicans who met on the Gold Coast earlier this month to gauge “how many and who” will join the Ordinariate, said the Ordinariate’s aim will be that of the universal Church ”“ to bring people into relationship with God.

Bishop Entwistle, who will address a Festival this Saturday at Holy Family Catholic Parish in Como to “introduce the Anglican Ordinariate for Australia”, said it has always been believed that the Ordinarate will begin “with smallish numbers who will then try to grow and evangelise”.

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To begin to think seriously about church planting is to begin to reframe the opportunities that lie before us. Imagine the vitality that would be released if two of our congregations in the four deaneries which have the greatest unchurched demographics (Beaufort, West Charleston, Charleston and Georgetown) planted two new congregations or satellites in the next five years. What new life would emerge within our communities and within the Diocese of South Carolina from eight new congregations or even twice that number? I believe this can be done even during a season of economic downturn. We often get fixated upon buildings and property. But for many in our present culture it is not the aesthetics of the building which attracts; it is the dynamism of the preaching, worship and fellowship which wins the heart of the unchurched person. Certainly we cannot leave entirely behind the need for property and buildings; a drab setting blesses no one’s heart. But if we can focus upon reaching the lost I believe the issues of property and building will emerge in many cases as quite secondary to the winning of the seeker and the transformation of his or her life in Christ. This change from building church plants to growing missional communities is a concept we need to embrace more fully. This will have the dynamism of a movement rather than the often stagnating effect of tending an institution.

The Diocese has in recent years held to the model of established parishes being planters of new churches or congregations. This has worked well in such places as The Cross, Bluffton where a satellite congregation was established at the Buckwalter Campus. So also with Holy Cross, Sullivan’s Island in the planting of a satellite at Daniel Island and their future plan of a third satellite congregation at ”˜Ion in the Mount Pleasant. Such vision is inspiring. Others like St. Paul’s Summerville, St. James’, James Island, St. John’s, Johns Island, and Christ Church, Mount Pleasant because of adjacent land were able to build ministry centers, essentially planting “congregations” on campus. There has been no lack of vision and creativity among us. Today, two of our congregations in the Georgetown deanery have begun initiatives as well. Trinity, Myrtle Beach, under the leadership of Rob Sturdy and Iain Boyd, has initiated a church plant in the Carolina Forest community. This is making good progress. The Rev. Wilmot Merchant and the people of St. Stephen’s, North Myrtle Beach with the help of the Congregational Development Committee purchased property in the Loris area for a potential church plant in the future. They are presently making a strong witness for Christ by their volunteer work in Loris Elementary School therein making a difference in children’s lives. It will also work as a relational base from which to plant a congregation in the future. Nevertheless, elsewhere we have lagged behind, and others have seized the day””God will have his witnesses ”“ with or without us.

The future of two other initiatives is more complicated and raises the question of Diocesan leadership in planting or acknowledging more complex cases. The Well By the Sea at Market Commons, in the area between Surfside and Myrtle Beach, is a “congregation” that has already outgrown its rented facilities and is at a crossroads….

Take the time to read it all.

Are we witnessing the death of America’s Christian denominations? Studies conducted by secular and Christian organizations indicate that we are. Fewer and fewer American Christians, especially Protestants, strongly identify with a particular religious communion””Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, etc. According to the Baylor Survey on Religion, nondenominational churches now represent the second largest group of Protestant churches in America, and they are also the fastest growing.

More and more Christians choose a church not on the basis of its denomination, but on the basis of more practical matters. Is the nursery easy to find? Do I like the music? Are there support groups for those grappling with addiction?

This trend is a natural extension of the American evangelical experiment. After all, evangelicalism is about the fundamental message of Christianity””the evangel, the gospel, literally the “good news” of God’s kingdom arriving in Jesus Christ””not about denomination building.

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A local pastor is leaving the 30th largest church in America for the sixth largest church in America — to help make the bigger church bigger.

Geoff Surratt, pastor of ministries at Mount Pleasant-based Seacoast Church, will join Rick Warren and Saddleback Church in Southern California as director of church planting, according to a news release.

Surratt will spearhead one of the key initiatives in Saddleback’s “Decade of Destiny Campaign,” which includes the launch of a new church planting center later this year. Part of Surratt’s responsibility will be to develop Warren’s vision for planting churches through that center and other programs, according to the release.

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The idea came out of the blue.

It was a crazy idea, holding church in a rock-‘n’-roll club. But the leadership at St. Andrew’s Church-Mount Pleasant had been thinking for a while about extending its reach, not by purchasing land and building church buildings, not by transforming their Old Village campus into a megachurch, not by investing money in things.
No, the goal was to reach people where they live, to delve deeply into the urban landscape, to leverage existing assets, foster communities and tie them together.

It’s the old way of “doing” Christianity, said the Rev. Steve Wood. It’s what the Apostle Paul did when he left the synagogue in Ephesus for the lecture hall of Tyrannus.

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Lapsed Catholics will be wooed as never before later this year when the church in Australia launches Catholics Come Home, a media campaign credited with lifting mass attendances in the US by up to 17 per cent.

Archbishop of Sydney George Pell is sending a team to Chicago to study and replicate the program, which tells non-practising Catholics: “There is a big family that loves you and misses you. It’s a wonderful adventure – you have nothing to lose and everything to gain – and we say welcome home.”

The television advertisements, Facebook entries and tweets also discuss the church’s role in schools, universities, health care and charitable works. “Progress has been good in turning around mass attendances so I’m sending over a small team to see what it might do for the church in Australia,” Pell says.

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It was a Sunday during Advent, and inside a small pub a few blocks up from the north shore of Lake Superior, 17 people gathered around four bar-top tables shoved into a ring.

Betsy Nelson, the bar’s cook, lit two candles with a cigarette lighter as Addison Houle strapped on an acoustic guitar and sang a slightly off-key rendition of “We Three Kings.” Curt “Fish” Anderson sipped a beer as TVs overhead flickered with NFL pregame shows.

“Father, thank you for this time we can share on Sunday morning with new friends,” prayed Chris Fletcher, an emergency medical technician, part-time bartender and seminary student who has led this service every Sunday morning at Dunnigan’s Pub & Grub since last summer. “We’re getting to know you, and getting to know each other better.”

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