By almost any metric, the churches in our nation are much less evangelistic today than they were in the recent past. In my own denomination, we are reaching non-Christians only half as effectively as we were 50 years ago (we measure membership to annual baptisms). The trend is disturbing.<\/p>\n
We certainly see the pattern in the early church where \u201cevery day the Lord added to them those who were being saved\u201d (Acts 2:47). In too many of our churches today, the congregations are reaching no one<\/em> for Christ in the course of an entire year.<\/p>\n The Poll<\/strong><\/p>\n I conducted an unscientific Twitter poll recently to see what church leaders and church members thought of this trend, My specific question was: \u201cWhy do you think many churches aren\u2019t as evangelistic as they once were?\u201d<\/p>\n The responses arrived quickly and in great numbers, both in public tweets and in direct messages to me. Indeed, I was still receiving responses four days after I sent my Twitter question.<\/p>\n The Results<\/strong><\/p>\n The response was highly informative for me. Here are the top fifteen responses listed in order of frequency:<\/p>\n So What Is the Solution?<\/strong><\/p>\n I received hundreds of responses to this poll. There is obviously widespread concern about the lack of evangelism in our churches and among Christians.<\/p>\n First, let me hear what you think of these responses. Second, and more importantly, offer some solutions to the challenges. Make certain those solutions include what you<\/em> can do as much as what they<\/em> should do. I look forward to hearing from you.<\/p>\n photo credit: people talking in paris<\/a> via photopin<\/a> (license)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is obviously widespread concern about the lack of evangelism in our churches and among Christians.","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":736273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"publish_to_discourse":"0","publish_post_category":"1","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"","discourse_permalink":"","wpdc_publishing_response":"","wpdc_publishing_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,175,180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-answers","category-grow","category-outreach-and-evangelism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n