Church Voices

Not to go into Driscoll overload, but here’s another one. He makes some excellent points, but here’s an interesting point I want to zero in on.

According to the guys with calculators at the denomination’s [Presby Church USA] headquarters, membership loss for the denomination in 2005 was estimated at sixty-five thousand, followed by an eighty-five thousand projected loss in 2006. According to The Layman Online, “Both the projected losses in members in 2005 and 2006 would be higher than any prior year’s downturn since the reunion of the northern and southern streams of the mainline denomination in 1983. The projected 2006 loss would represent a single-year decline of 3.7 percent, the highest percentage loss in the denomination’s 216-year history.”

Curiously, no explanation was given for the continued decline of the denomination. Perhaps that is because such an explanation would require repentance for getting off track of the mission of the gospel to fight over such things as homosexuality and feminism. These cancers are eating away at many liberal denominations and are now spreading to younger emerging-type Christian networks caught driving around the same moral and theological cul-de-sacs that a previous generation wasted their life on while failing to do evangelism and plant churches.

This is not exactly a new observation. What is new is the application of this observation to “emerging-type” Christians. Everytime a church focuses on the latest pet project of Bono they are working against the interest of creating a thriving church.