Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Is Your Church Dead? checklist

Frank Fears gives a checklist of things for you to measure life in your church:

1. Ask for a show of hands of those members who did not attend church before the age of 21. In the typical church, less than 3% will respond as being "harvested" Christians. That is, they were saved as adults, rather than being raised in church. (The vast majority of church members were taken or sent to church as children, and are thus "homegrown". )

2. Ask for a show of hands of those who have never been membeers of another church. The great majority, who are unable to raise a hand, are those who came to your church from another church, and probably several others before that.

3. Ask for testimonies from those who can relate having shared God's plan of salvation from the bible, with a lost person sometime within the last year. Have them share who, whre, when, and go over the passages used.

If less than a 10% response is obtained in any of the survey, your church is not just ailing. It is most definitely dead. If the response is only slightly more, the end is in sight. The exceedingly rare, live church will have at least a 25% response in all three surveys.

Is your church dead or alive?
David

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that this would be a 'scary' test for most churches that are quite satisfied in a dead state vs being a live church. However, scary doesn't mean that this isn't a needed evaluation. For example, my parents knew that I was scared of the dentist as a kid, but they still took me because it was needed and good for me.

David P Smith said...

It is scary! We need to get scared! Maybe this will cause some to turn around and do what it will take to wake up.
David