If I were to ask you to guess the percentage of people in the GR area that claim to have “no religious affiliation,” what would your guess be? Surely in a place like GR with so many churches the number must be low. 20%? 30%? 40%? Actually overall numbers are closer to 60% of respondents who claim no religious affiliation, a category demographers are calling “nones”.
Perhaps this number is surprising to you, perhaps not. In either case it is a call to prayer, a call to action. Your community is not as churched as you believe. Think about it. Roughly every other person you meet today claims to be a “none”. They do not belong to a worshiping community. They do not hear the Gospel regularly. Most importantly, there is good reason to believe that they do not have a relationship with the Savior.
How are we going to serve them with the love of Christ? Certainly our individual lives offer ample opportunity for hospitality and involvement in the lives of these “nones.” What about our church life? Consider these words from Tim Keller on why we plant churches. “Dozens of denominational studies have confirmed that the average new church gains most of its new members (60–80%) from the ranks of people who are not attending any worshiping body, while churches over ten to fifteen years of age gain 80–90 percent of new members by transfer from other congregations. This means the average new congregation (i.e. church plant) will bring six to eight times more new people into the life of the body of Christ than an older congregation of the same size.” There is much to dissect her to be sure. But we can say at the very least this is a major reason for pursuing church planting.
Perhaps this number is surprising to you, perhaps not. In either case it is a call to prayer, a call to action. Your community is not as churched as you believe. Think about it. Roughly every other person you meet today claims to be a “none”. They do not belong to a worshiping community. They do not hear the Gospel regularly. Most importantly, there is good reason to believe that they do not have a relationship with the Savior.
How are we going to serve them with the love of Christ? Certainly our individual lives offer ample opportunity for hospitality and involvement in the lives of these “nones.” What about our church life? Consider these words from Tim Keller on why we plant churches. “Dozens of denominational studies have confirmed that the average new church gains most of its new members (60–80%) from the ranks of people who are not attending any worshiping body, while churches over ten to fifteen years of age gain 80–90 percent of new members by transfer from other congregations. This means the average new congregation (i.e. church plant) will bring six to eight times more new people into the life of the body of Christ than an older congregation of the same size.” There is much to dissect her to be sure. But we can say at the very least this is a major reason for pursuing church planting.
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