Members of Discovery Groups are also encouraged to tell others about what they are learning. So, even before they come to faith, they are discipled into sharing what they are learning about God. As a result, when they do come to faith, it is the most natural thing in the world to them to share it with others, to start new Discover Groups, and even to found simple churches.
People like carpenters, sports coaches, taxi drivers, schoolteachers, custodians, farmers, and even politicians are making disciples and planting churches.
In some parts of Africa, we can identify movements with more than thirty generations of churches planting churches. Lay ministry is also central in the Global South to finding pastors. In many churches in America, to become a pastor requires years of formal education, at the very least a degree from a Bible college and often a Master of Divinity degree. Aside from an internship, evidence of effectiveness in pastoral ministry is not necessary, at least for people starting out.
Where Christianity is spreading rapidly, evidence of effective ministry precedes the call to be a pastor. You have to have a track record of making disciples and planting churches before you are recognized as a pastor. And that paradigm in turn is based on a very different way of thinking about the Kingdom, the Gospel, the Church, and the ways the invisible world of the Spirit interacts with the physical world.
What would happen to the church in America and Europe if we revised our ministry paradigms to align with what Jesus himself taught and did? What would happen if we adopted different practices like those of the churches of the Global South? For more information: www.
He is a speaker, the author of several books, and co-author with Jerry Trousdale of The Kingdom Unleashed. Research Topics. For details about the methodology employed for the and Religious Landscape Studies, click here. If the next Religious Landscape Study is conducted using a self-administered mode of survey administration e. This is because questions about religious identity, belief and practice can be sensitive, and some respondents may be reluctant to admit to interviewers that they are not religious.
In the U. In other words, respondents may more honestly report low levels of religiosity in self-administered surveys, when no interviewer is present. When prompted by a survey question to report how often they attend religious services, respondents who say they attend every week may be indicating that they see themselves as the kind of people who regularly go to services, rather than that they never miss a week of church.
For a discussion of differences between self-reported attendance and actual attendance rates, see Brenner, Philip S. Overreporting of Church Attendance in the U. Though this body of research suggests that attendance measures from surveys may not necessarily be the best gauge of the share of people who attend services in any given week, knowing whether respondents think of themselves as regular churchgoers is nevertheless very important because this measure of religious commitment often is correlated with other religious beliefs and practices, as well as with social and political attitudes.
In addition to the overreporting of church attendance that arises from asking respondents directly about how often they attend religious services, readers should bear in mind that telephone opinion surveys can produce overestimates of religious attendance due to high rates of nonresponse.
Those estimates were similar to the figures shown in this analysis. The full report can be found online at www. The number of years for the number of Christians to double, based on the Average Annual Growth Rate has also been calculated.
Waiting for your positive replay. Hi Pr. The top 20 countries where Christianity is growing the fastest 1st November For example:. Experts believe this decline has resulted from the increasing climate of skepticism in general, and a growing hostility toward Christian faith in various influential sectors within society. An even steeper rate of decline has occurred in Canada and Europe, with the exception of portions of Eastern Europe, where Christian faith has been on the upswing since World War II.
Overall, Christianity is doing very well around he world. Contrary to the predictions of many in the Western world, Christianity is not in any danger, but continues to be the largest single religious family and is steadily gaining ground in many parts of the world.
American Christians can be encouraged by this fact, while finding new and creative ways to stop and reverse the decline we are seeing in our own culture.
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