Crisis! What to do, what to do (wringing hands)

Thom Rainer, President of LifeWay, wrote a sobering article on the current crisis in the American church. His main support comes from new 2004 data. He writes, “It takes 86 church members in America one year to reach a person for Christ.” So a group of 86 average church members would require 86 years just to reproduce themselves (keeping the numbers static, nevermind kingdom expansion).

Bill Dahl at the Porpoise Diving Life has written an amazing article titled The Red 'C.' He uses the Apollo 13 mission as a metaphor for the mission of the church, and how we respond to our own failure. Hopefully, we'll respond as NASA did, and take responsibility for the crisis.

Or... Will we continue to ignore the missiologists, the researchers, the stats that reveal our inability to complete the mission (like Barna, Willow Creek's REVEAL, etc)? Can it be that faulty paradigms of 'church' are responsible for these statistics, these failures? Will we even confront and admit our own barrenness? Or will we sink into denial, and just go about doing what we've always done, even though it's not working and eternity is at stake?! (As my friend Charis posted about recently, do we even care that our actions will be judged by God? Is there no fear of the Lord anymore?) Will our pride get in the way? Or will we face this crisis head-on, allow it to humble us and cause us to cry out to God? Are we even asking Him what this crisis means, and what He wants to reveal to us in the midst of it?

But wait, we already have it all figured out, don't we. We know how to do this. We've been doing it for hundreds of years now, we've got it down to a science, already worked out all the wrinkles - been there, done that. Eventually, those lost people are gonna wanna jump on board with our program! Right? It can't be that our paradigm and methodologies are off. Well, maybe the methodology only needs a little tweaking, but as long as our paradigm of 'church' remains in tact...

Here's a preview of Bill's article:

“As we move to the other side, our greatest enemy will not be our ignorance; it will be our unteachability. It won’t be what we don’t know that threatens us; it will be what we do know. We know too much --- so much that we can’t learn how much we need to learn.”[xxx] A crew member places his hand on Major Tom’s shoulder as they turn and gaze at the ‘C’ module marooned on the reef: “This won’t be an easy journey even after we have dismounted from the old dead horse.”[xxxi]