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Well you should be thankful that you were born in a family where you have the freedom to choose how you wish to follow Christ, without any condemnation for it, nor pressure

I am very grateful for the family I am born into, and my parents in particular. However, it is not true that I had the "freedom to choose how I wish to follow Christ" or no pressure.

My parents are quite saddened I do not believe in speaking in tongues. It has taken them years to accept me being part of a conservative Anabaptist lifestyle and congregation, although nowadays they seem rather positive about it. But there is always a subtext that they basically feel I abandoned truly obeying the Bible because I don't subscribe to Charismatic / Pentecostal theology.

The same is true for parents who are in any other sect and whose children go to another one, other than parents who are part of a very, very liberal, "anything goes" kind of denomination.

KingdomBuilder wrote:I thought the fastest growing in the US/CA were JW and LDS.

They have much bigger total numbers, but their rate of growth isn't anything close to the Amish.

Amish numbered 10,000 a century and a half ago. Nowadays they are well into the hundreds of thousands. If you include all plain Anabaptists including their children, they are almost to a million. And a few sects (like Swartzies) are multiplying really fast - not only do they have 9 children per women, but their retention rate of youth is very high.

Josh wrote:

KingdomBuilder wrote:I thought the fastest growing in the US/CA were JW and LDS.

They have much bigger total numbers, but their rate of growth isn't anything close to the Amish.

Amish numbered 10,000 a century and a half ago. Nowadays they are well into the hundreds of thousands. If you include all plain Anabaptists including their children, they are almost to a million. And a few sects (like Swartzies) are multiplying really fast - not only do they have 9 children per women, but their retention rate of youth is very high.

Perhaps the major studies are simply gleaming over the Plain?

KB, what do you mean by "gleaming over?"

The Young Center has new data on the Amish - grew by 100,000 in the past decade. http://amishamerica.com/amish-grew-by-1 ... 2007-2017/

This will be a very quick answer. Hopefully, someone else hasn't made the same comments.

It is not surprising that the Amish have the fastest growing church. The problem with the vast majority of denominations (or churches) is that they are not appealing to their communities. They may have wonderful preaching and singing, but very few come to visit. There are many reasons whey denominations decline. Since I am not a church growth expert, I can't give all the reasons why there is failure to grow. One thing the Amish are doing right (or at least that's my speculation), is they are retaining their children. Many protestant churches are not retaining their children. They are sending their kids to secular schools and colleges where they are filled with ungodly information and have ungodly professors. What should we expect?
If a church has 100 members and they retain their children, they would have 300 members in 20 years (considering they have at least 2 children). Actually, the growth could start right away if they would make those changes right now. Godly education would help to retain our children, but we also need our children to see Godliness demonstrated in the home as well. Maybe I am over simplifying things, but this would be a good goal to work towards.
Ken

After posting the last message I suddenly realized that my math was really off. 100 members of a church aren't all going to have children. So, let's start over. Most likely 35 percent of the total will be wives and mothers. It would be difficult to figure exactly what the increase would be due to varying birth dates, but suffice it to say that with power of multiplication in would only take a couple of generations to have a good size church. Hopefully, we would also expect to see some people dying off, and some new visitors coming in and joining the church. Somehow, we need to do something different to stop the declining attendance.

Ken

I taught at two colleges which originated in the Anabaptist tradition. One was "church-related" and the other was "Christian." I became disillusioned with both of them. ((I guess I must be too idealistic; I become disillusioned very easily!)

The point I want to make here is that it is extremely difficult to find a church-connected college that offers a sound academic experience while also encouraging the student's commitment to the Christian faith and the community of faith.

Among my own relatives, those who were home-schooled from beginning to end have become the most steadfast Christians. BUT none of them graduated from college and I question whether they could emerge in one piece from intensive interaction with educated non-Christians.

I speculate that a high church growth rate requires being "out of the loop" in education and in participation in modern society.

The fastest growing group (by far) in America is the Old Order Amish, with a doubling time estimated at 19 years. See Doubling Time and Population Increase of the Amish in JAPAS vol. 3, no. 1.

The fastest sub-group of them are, in turn, Swartzentruber Amish, with a mean TFR (total fertility rate) per woman of 9.0, which is amongst the highest in the world.

Whatever it is the Amish are doing, they are managing to make sure they continue to have marriages, large families, and that their young people choose to stay in their group and also have marriages and large families. That's something that is overall no longer the case for Christian religion in North America.

So I've got a question that relates to this but maybe should be its own thread. If the LDS and JWs are the fastest growing churches in America "through evangelism " , why don't we do more of what they Do? If they get converts by door to door evangelism and they don't even have the truth and the joy of the Lord, think what true christians could do through the power of Christ. Why don't we learn from them?