Why Is It So Hard?

If you've gone back through the archives on this blog you have a glimpse of my frustration with the way church gets done. There are certainly success stories out there but they are rare. That may seem harsh, but keep in mind that there are 300,000+ Christian churches in this country. Places like Willow Creek and Saddle Back rise to the top when you talk about making a meaningful impact. There are certainly many others but is the number 1,000? 5,000? Are there 30,000 revolutionary, life-changing, radically effective churches out there? That would be 10% of all churches in the country.

Think about that. If just ten percent of all churches were radically, revolutionarily effective in impacting their communities and changing lives that would be 30,000 churches. Now follow me here...there are fewer than 2000 cities with a population of 10,000 people or more (that includes the giant cities like New York and Los Angeles). But if there are roughly 300,000,000 people in the U.S. and there were 30,000 radically effective Christian churches in this country each church could serve a community of 10,000 people and we would be serving the entire U.S. population. How hard is that? Well, if the average weekly attendance of a radically effective, life-changing church is 500 people, over the course of a year each of those attenders would have to directly touch the lives of 20 people. Is each person attending your church directly affecting the lives of 20 people in your community?

Based on the way this country is going and the declaration of Newsweek that Christianity is pretty much over in the U.S. I'm going to hazard a guess that there aren't 30,000 radically effective churches in this country. In fact, I'm going out on a limb to say that there might not even be 3,000 radically effective churches. Maybe I should say more about what I consider to be radically effective. That's a topic for another post. In any case, if less than ten percent of our churches are making a genuine difference in their communities and it could be as little as one percent, I'm left to wonder what makes being effective so hard? I welcome your thoughts.