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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, which is the fastest growing church of them all? And why?

http://www.frcblog.com/2017/03/amish-am ... ng-church/

Bill Rushby wrote:Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, which is the fastest growing church of them all? And why?

http://www.frcblog.com/2017/03/amish-am ... ng-church/

The fastest growing sector of the evangelical world right now is the Amish.

Well, there's your answer. The Amish aren't "evangelical", which is why they aren't shrinking each year.

Hello, Josh!
You haven't given a rationale for your opinion. If not being evangelical is the key to church growth, why are the Assembly of God and Pentecostalism growing so rapidly? And what about the COGICM? And why are the mainline churches losing ground in number of members so rapidly?
Bill Rushby

Fascinating article. There's another thread on it from a few months ago.

Our problem has everything to do with our view of children and the family. Churches that do not have members having children will not succeed.

Now, every Christian does not have to embrace the "19 Kids and Counting" lifestyle. Christ is still our ultimate goal and not family size. But, we must begin to revive pro-family values in our churches. Being pro-family goes well past having a catchy kids’ program. We need to celebrate birth. We need to praise parents for having big families instead of chastising them with snide comments. We need to come to the point where we value kids more than traveling, nice homes, and our own tranquility. We need to live as if children are a blessing.

This is much, much easier said than done. Unfortunately I don't think one will get anywhere by suggesting Southern Baptists or anybody else should have more children. The trends even among most conservative Mennonites are toward smaller families. We are mirroring the demographics of the general population, and the blogger is just being honest with the fact that SBs are facing a demographic decline which is having real effects. Many other groups are facing similar situations. I am even going to guess that Amish family sizes are declining. Perhaps Edsel has data on this.

The blogger hedges away from saying outright that people should have more children ("Now, every Christian does not have to embrace the "19 Kids and Counting" lifestyle"). He says that we need to celebrate birth, praise parents for having big families, etc. But he might as well say it: the fact is that if people don't start having larger families, many Christian churches and larger groups as well face demographic decline.

I am pessimistic about this trend reversing. In a day and age when many factors of modern life should converge to create the ideal environment for the flourishing of larger families, the opposite is happening.

I was unaware that Mike had already started a thread based on the article we are discussing. I suggest that we move this discussion to that thread. http://forum.mennonet.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=441

I'll use this thread to talk about demographics specifically.

Swartzentrubers have the biggest TFR - 9.0 per woman. Other Amish are around 6.0. Swartzentrubers have by far the least convenient lives, yet somehow have on average 9 children per woman - including unmarried or barren women who never have kids. There's no country in the world that matches Swartzies. Niger has the highest at 8.0 (along with a very high infant mortality rate). Anish have low infant mortality.

For comparison, the next group in America with most significant fecundity are Mormons in Utah who are about 3.0.

The future looks like a huge amount of Swartzies, a good deal of Amish, a few Mormons, and then some museums dedicated to explaining just what evangelical Christians were and why they died out, perhaps next door to a museum about the Shakers.

(See JAPAS' recent article about doubling time of Amish for sources on those statistics.)

Bill Rushby wrote:Hello, Josh!
You haven't given a rationale for your opinion. If not being evangelical is the key to church growth, why are the Assembly of God and Pentecostalism growing so rapidly? And what about the COGICM? And why are the mainline churches losing ground in number of members so rapidly?
Bill Rushby

Pentecostalism worldwide is very good at converting Catholics or people in other Christian faiths like third world Anglicanism.
Overall it is not particularly productive. The real thing to look at is youth retention rates and sources of new converts. If the former is low, and the latter source is people who already are some flavour of Christian, the long term prognosis is not good.

I would not describe the CGCM as having an evangelical orientation.

Josh wrote:

Bill Rushby wrote:Hello, Josh!
You haven't given a rationale for your opinion. If not being evangelical is the key to church growth, why are the Assembly of God and Pentecostalism growing so rapidly? And what about the COGICM? And why are the mainline churches losing ground in number of members so rapidly?
Bill Rushby

Pentecostalism worldwide is very good at converting Catholics or people in other Christian faiths like third world Anglicanism.
Overall it is not particularly productive. The real thing to look at is youth retention rates and sources of new converts. If the former is low, and the latter source is people who already are some flavour of Christian, the long term prognosis is not good.

I would not describe the CGCM as having an evangelical orientation.

I would define evangelical as describing a group's theology, and evangelistic as describing their outreach activity. So you could be evangelical without being evangelistic, or evangelistic without being evangelical.