Hi guys!

How’s this from Greg Stier

(Greg Stier is the founder and president of Dare 2 Share Ministries International)

Its Amercan, of course, but I think a snapshot of churches worldwide

CHURCH PLANTING AND THE BIG MATH PROBLEM

There’s a church planting frenzy in America right now. And honestly? I get it. As a former church planter, I know how exciting and faith-stretching it can be to launch something new for the Kingdom.

But here’s a question we need to wrestle with:

Do we just need more churches?

America already has 300,000 Protestant churches…but only about 35,000 cities and towns.

The answer isn’t simply more, more, more.

It’s more… and better.

Yes, we need more churches in more corners of our cities. But what we desperately need are more evangelistically effective churches everywhere.

Right now we’re doing bad math.

If the average church leads 2 people to Christ per year, that’s about 600,000 new believers annually.

Even if we doubled church plants from 5,000 to 10,000 per year, that only adds about 20,000 more believers.

But consider this:

• U.S. population: 320 million

• Annual deaths: 2.6 million

620,000 new disciples a year isn’t even close. We’re not even beating the death rate.

So the solution can’t just be plant more churches.

We have to increase both sides of the equation:

 More churches

 More disciples made in every church

What if the 300,000 existing churches each led 10 people to Christ a year instead of 2?

That’s 3 million new disciples annually.

Add 10,000 new churches reaching 10 people each and now we’re at 3.1 million new disciples every year.

Now we’re finally beating the death rate.

That’s the kind of multiplication we see in the book of Acts.

We call it Gospel Advancing—seven biblical values that create a culture of evangelism and disciple multiplication.

When churches embrace these values:

Disciples multiply.

Churches thrive.

And the math finally works.

So let’s do the math.

And let’s start multiplying.

See less