7 posts tagged “church”
the newest installment of my video blog...
here's the latest video. it is entitled 3 Questions.
there are three vital, critical questions confronting the church in this hour, and until we can think through these questions and offer legitimate answers we will be without a credible voice...
3 For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
One more follow-up on yesterday’s post:
So, what if the The American Church article’s assessment is true? What if the vaunted number -- 40% of the American population attends church on any given Sunday -- is actually 10% to 15%, what then because of the "halo affect"?
Well, it might very well mean that we are much farther down the road toward Christendom’s final gasp than we previously thought.
And what if the mega-church growth is actually and mostly transfer growth -- the mere moving from small to large -- and not the power of evangelism? Could it be that there will be a tip-point when the mega-churches have all the people willing to move to larger digs?
And what if the The American Church assessment is true: "Attendance is down. The picture is bleak. New research reveals startling and sobering facts. What do they mean for you, your church and Christianity in America?," then what will our churches do? That is, how should we live?
But, might the twist in the tail to all this just be that what we are experiencing as death and exile in the disintegration of Christendom is actually renaissance, a re-birth to something new? And that the generation not yet Christian will usher in a new way of church?
http://www.abpnews.com/www/3047.article
http://www.ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=10146
- Less than 20% of Americans regularly attend church—half of what the pollsters report
- American church attendance is steadily declining
- Only one state is outpacing its population growth
- Mid-sized churches are shrinking; the smallest and largest churches are growing
- Established churches—40 to 190 years old—are, on average, declining
- The increase in churches is only 1/4 of what's needed to keep up with population growth
- In 2050, the percentage of the U.S. population attending church will be almost half of what it was in 1990
This Quiet Life offered a very interesting question in the post Out of the Box: What are evangelicals? Actually, this way of identifying which flavor of Christendom you prefer is in flux. Many older evangelicals would be as This Quiet Life describes, life-denying fundamentalists, only better educated. However, of late there is a new brand of younger evangelicals springing forth onto the landscape. Robert Webber, in his book The Younger Evangelicals, identifies this transition.
Webber says:
- they no longer need to bow before rationalism
- they know the world has changed (to post-modern or hyper-modernity)
- they know they must stand for the faith in a new way
- they know that they are indebted to the ancient faith and they are searching to find its relevance
- they are committed to what we used to call a social ministry
- a facility with technology
- a willingness to live by he rules (less permissive)
- a resurgence of the arts in the church
- the importance of symbols in the church
- a yearning for community
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Apologetics Updated: 6 hours ago
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Rethinking The Church & Its Relationship to the Community Updated: 6 hours ago
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