by Sandy » Mon Jan 06, 2014 7:31 am
I've served churches and lived in areas where the existing churches were too closed off and inwardly focused to be deeply involved in evangelism and outreach. I was in a small town in Southern Missouri at a First Baptist Church, and there were many people in that congregation who had the idea that if people didn't come to our church on Sunday, they were probably going somewhere. I would guess that probably 70% of the people in the area either were not connected to a church, or rarely attended. There may be a lot of churches in a particular area, but there may be few that are suited to reaching people not already involved.
Sometimes, especially in areas like Dave describes, where the population is stable, largely rural, and declining, churches reach all of the "low hanging fruit," and the remaining unchurched population is hard to reach. So the churches turn inward, and are not sensitive to the things they can do ministry wise to reach those who are harder to reach. They adopt an attitude that says, "They know where we are. If they're interested, they'll come." That's one of the reasons that new churches reach more people than old ones do.
There are church "plants" out there that are set up and designed to build a congregation by taking some people from existing congregations. Sometimes, that conveys an arrogance, a "we know how to do it better" attitude, or they use their resources to create the "smorgasbord" of activity that is inwardly focused. A lot of the mega churches don't really even care where their members come from, as long as they're there on enough Sundays to give well.