I have heard comments from people as well as from myself when I was younger that we have too many churches in America. I have heard some naive missions zealots declare that they wish they could burn down some churches just to minimize the superfluous amount there is in some American cities.
What is a good size for a church? I know on the missions field in unreached areas, if we had multiple churches of 15 or 20 people we would be so thrilled and excited. Think about the Praise God would get if you were to say there were 1,000 house churches in a city in Mali. That would be exciting.
In America it is said we have too many churches, “one on each corner”. Which I do say we have many churches, structured churches that don’t in anyway resemble a house church movement like we would like to see overseas. However, in America this has been the trend, the culture if you will, and as missionaries we need to seek to preserve culture while at the same time eliminating from it what is not from the Lord. This could be a process that takes years to do. Because it is not an external issue we are dealing with but an internal worldview paradigm that we are working with.
I have roughly cruched some numbers using Google Maps to give me the number of churches within a two mile radius of cities and then also getting the total population of cities from the US Census Bureau. I have some interesting numbers to show that too many churches still isn’t enough. This is good news for the wannabe church planter/missionary in the states because it means you don’t have to be burning rubber while you wait to go, but start plowing in the fields that are ripe for harvest in your own backyard.
Oklahoma City 1 church for every 128 people
Chicago 1 church for every 187 people
LA 1 church for every 478 people
Souix Falls, SD 1 church for every 82 people
Houston, TX 1 church for every 215 people
Miami, FL 1 church for every 63 people
Phoenix, AZ 1 church for every 352 people
Boston, MA 1 church for every 666 people
Of course some of the listings of churches within the google searches weren’t evangelical. Some were catholic, unitarian and even morman. What I wanted to describe to us is the fact that as church planters at heart it is not right for us to say we have a passion for the lost and eagerness for planting churches when we grumble and complain at the blessings in our own backyards. True many of the churches in America might be backwards and preaching gospels we don’t agree with, but the plus side is at least people have access to the truth, whereas among the unreached there is no one to tell them.
Our goal should be to find within our cities those in whom the church is not reaching out too. What groups are not being identified with? I know there are plenty of people who attend strip clubs, that are never appraoched by a Christian, there are plenty of deaf people within our cities who have never heard of Jesus. There are plenty of ghetto areas that have never had one person knock on their door and ask them if they could pray for them. There are even unreached peoples living within our communities who never make it outside of their homes to meet people and will never hear the gospel unless someone walks next door or drives down the street and invites them to the neighborhood.
Please comment and let me know how you think.