Will Church Planting Stem the Decline of the Church In America?

[Lynn S. Nored]

Recently Mark Woodward of Let's Start Talking posed the following question on his blog ( http://www.wadehodges.com/2005/04/19/an-emerging-church-of-christ-p... ): "Is the proliferation of new church plants simply covering up the fact that the religious marketplace is much less “profitable”? To use the language of business: are we closing old stores and opening new stores, but that strategy in and of itself is not adequate to keep our business profitable? " According to the Christian Chronicle (Feb. 2009)"In the newly released directory, 21st Century Christian identifies 12,629 a cappella Churches of Christ with 1,578,281 adherents nationwide. Those figures represent 526 fewer churches and 78,436 fewer people in the pews than just six years ago." If church planting is the answer, then we need to step up the pace. From their web site I count 15 church plants by Kairos, 15 by Mission Alive; 14 by Genesis Alliance ( Hispanic) and 200 by the Christian Church planting organization Stadia. It also remains to be seen whether a particular methodology (CPM) is viable in our post modern world. Of course it is possible the number of congregations can grow exponentially if each church plant results in multiple church plants from each one. And, one cannot rule out how God and the Holy Spirit is at work. From a human standpoint, if church planting is the result of training by church planting organizations, it is unlikely to keep pace with the closing of churches.

Another question posed within Mark's question is whether what is being provided to non-Christians in church plants is viable enough to offset church closings? Here we come up against a ingrained mindset from the modern era. Wade Hodges in a series of blog posts entitled "An Emerging Church of Christ" ( http://www.wadehodges.com/2005/04/19/an-emerging-church-of-christ-p... )said the following: "Another reason Churches of Christ are struggling to engage our emerging culture is that we are paralyzed by the fear of being wrong. Our heritage, which has trained us to try to be “right” in all things, has seriously altered and impaired our God-given creativity gene." In others words, change in churches of Christ is extremely difficult. Because we are "right"

I would submit that returning to Christ as the center of our appeal, engaging the post-modern culture on its terms, and implementing a missional theology in our existing churches is necessary along with church planting. Church planting per se is not the complete answer