9/11/2001 seems like a long time ago. I remember that period of time immediately following the attacks. Never in my life have I seen such unity in our nation. When we went to war it was with a nearly unanimous voice. Now eight years later, we have war fatigue. We have forgotten the initial shock of the images of death and destruction. We haven’t had any further attacks on our land, so we the urgency has fallen off. We have learned that our enemy, though not as advanced with weapons as we though, has the potential to outlast us. Now only the most vocal supporters of the war are left.
This reminds me a lot of church planting. In the initial months, the team is very aware that the enemy is real and that we are in unity fighting a vital war. Evangelistic fervor is high. People on the team make incredible sacrifices of both time and money. But after a couple of years the church has been started and war fatigue sets in. Evangelism no longer feels attached to survival, so its done less. The enemy doesn’t seem as active, so we begin to focus inward and take it easy. Have you experienced war fatigue in your church?
In the Converge system, we have every church planter work through a plan to establish evangelistic DNA in the new church. Many planters don’t know what to do with that. They can’t imagine not having evangelistic DNA. But trust me this is something you want to be intentional about because war fatigue will set in. There will come a point when the intensity comes down and people begin to look inward. What will you do to train people for evangelism? What will you do to consistently cast the vision to be an evangelistic church. How will you measure if war fatigue is setting in? Thom Rainer in his book, Surprising Insights from the Unchurched, suggest that an evangelistic church is one that has an attendance to baptism ratio of 20:1. What is your ratio? Does your ratio suggest that war fatigue is setting in?
Tags: church planting · Converge · Evangelism · new churchesNo Comments
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.