sojourner wrote: ↑Sun Jun 30, 2024 8:06 pm
I don't think our success at spreading the gospel can purely be judged by numbers.
It is our job to get the message out but only God can move hearts.
Exactly. We do not convert people. We plant the seed.
Also, I don't fully understand the need to blast these "cornfield churches" as you call them.
Most churches I have attended were in or close to towns.
Even these "corn field" areas are quite populated with people.
I’ve seen both sides. Our prior church was in the country and maybe had 50 people in a square mile around it.
The church we go to now is in a sizable city with at least three colleges in it.
As an evangelist minded individual that holds a full-time job, how many people do you interact with each day?
I'm not convinced that living in the biggest cities will somehow lead to more converts.
We have more interactions with the project homes near the church and the children tend to get rides to the Monday night outreach program. VBS will likely have the church children outnumbered by community children.
The prior church didn’t do much.
Location is maybe 20-40% of the problem. The real problem is people.
My current job, I see two people on any regular basis. The gate guard (20 seconds and different person most of the time) and the parent of my patient. Otherwise, it’s me alone with a severely disabled child for 12 hours a day 4 days a week. My off days are generally spent at my house trying to catch up on chores.
Prior to Mennonites I had visited easily hundreds of non denominational to Baptist churches. My parents were picky.
Most had VBS once a year and over half had Awanas. I was in Awanas most of my childhood and worked in the program for years. I also worked with a youth pastor for 2 years while starting down the Anabaptist route.
We are arguing about outreach but the most significant thing to Mennonites doing outreach is true conversion. Awanas focused on the sinners prayer and we had plenty of converts. Following Awanas, they generally headed off to college and left the church. Saw it too many times.
The youth group I worked in had several neighborhood children who would do drugs out back and generally were a bad influence. The youth pastor, after I expressed my concerns for the dangers and lack of spiritual teaching, started playing a 5 minute Comedy Christian outreach thing. It was entertaining, but didn’t really teach much at all. After a month or two, he asked me what I thought. I told him it was a start, but we needed more. This was a seminary educated man. Somehow, my uneducated self recognized some serious problems here.
I do remember some people that were serious about Christianity in these churches But there wasn’t really much in way of outreach. Those churches were doing quite well outside of not retaining their youth and not really getting new Christians.
So if we’re wanting to do a comparison between the average church in the world and a conservative Mennonite church, the numbers are obviously not going to be equivalent. True conversion is not marked by people converting during the childhood and abandoning the faith when they reach college, or retaining Christian on their Facebook page while living in sin. It wasn’t that they had standards or even had to do anything…. Rather, it was because they didn’t. I run into far more people who claim to be spiritual and want absolutely no influence from anyone else. Their relationship with God is entirely self-centered and their God is themselves.
I seem to recall there was some research following the conversions from people Billy Graham, it wasn’t very optimistic. We without fancy events or big money are far more likely to get people willing to follow faithfully and obey Jesus.