March 15, 2000
Hundreds of new churches needed
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___The first 18 members of Brian Lightsey's church came out of nowhere.
___Nowhere in the sense that before they started attending Lakeline Church north of Austin, they weren't attending anyone else's church. Well, actually, one of the couples did attend another church once or twice a month, but they weren't committed there.
___That's more unchurched people than the average Texas Baptist church attracts in amonth, perhaps in several months.
BGCT offers support, guidance for church starting
___And these 18 adults were only the beginning point for an effort that in less than four years has brought 100 people to profess faith in Jesus Christ and drawn 300 people into weekly worship.
___The vast majority of the 300 people attending Lakeline today didn't move their membership from another Baptist church, the most common form of growth in Texas Baptist churches.
___Half the church's membership entered the church through a first-time profession of faith and baptism. The other half were Christians who weren't going to church anywhere.
___"Seventy-five percent of our membership comes from an unchurched background," Lightsey explained. "They weren't in church at least five years before coming to Lakeline."
___What made this type of evangelism and discipleship possible? Lakeline is a new church, started in 1997 with the express purpose of reaching non-believers and church dropouts.
___The Lakeline story illustrates why Texas Baptists must start hundreds more new churches all across the state, according to E.B. Brooks and Fred Ater, church starting leaders with the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
___Don't get them wrong, they insist; they've got nothing against existing churches and believe every Texas Baptist church plays a vital role in missions, evangelism and Christian growth. But the statistical fact is that new churches do a far better job of evangelism than existing churches.
___If Texas Baptists are serious about reaching the state's burgeoning population with the gospel, they must get serious about church starting, Brooks and Ater insist.
___"We've got to change. We've got to be radical, different from what we are now. It's time to wake up," said Ater, coordinator of the BGCT's new Church Starting Institute.
___Existing churches do a respectable job of reaching the children and relatives of members, Ater said. But that leaves a huge segment of the Texas population unreached.
___"Our children and close relatives need to come to Christ," he affirmed. "But to reach the general population, we're going to have to be more aggressive than that."
___Despite its reputation as a bastion of religious belief, Texas is changing and already has changed, Ater said. Millions of Texans today have no church affiliation, no church experience and no faith relationship with Jesus Christ, he reported.
___"We do have a lot of Baptist churches in Texas, and we praise the Lord for that," Ater said. "Unfortunately, we can't look only at our successes. We also have to look at demographics. Our state has experienced rapid growth."
___According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, the population of Texas has more than doubled over the last 40 years, from 9.6 million in 1960 to more than 20 million today. Some demographers predict the state's population will double again by 2040.
___Even if new churches weren't more effective than existing churches in evangelism, Texas Baptists still would need to start hundreds of new churches just to keep up with the population growth, added Brooks, director of the BGCT's Church Starting Center.
___"We have fewer and fewer churches per person in Texas," he explained. "The church-to-population ratio keeps going down. We had 3,000 churches in 1900 when the population was 3 million. The same church-to-population ratio today would be 20,000 churches."
___Instead of 20,000, the BGCT today counts about 6,000 churches and missions among its ranks. That's only one church or mission for every 3,300 residents.
___The number of Texas Baptist churches has grown, but not nearly enough, Ater asserted. Just to assure that Texas Baptists keep pace with today's numbers in the future will require thousands of new churches, he added.
___"How long has it taken us to get 6,000 churches in Texas? And how long will it take us to meet the challenge of a doubled population?"
___The need for new churches in Texas is multi-faceted, Ater and Brooks said.
___One facet is ethnicity. "The state continues to enjoy the immigration of numerous cultural and national groups, and we have to provide churches for them," Brooks said. "The number of languages now is around 100. We have churches that teach the Bible or preach in about 42 of those."
___Much progress has been made in starting and developing Hispanic churches, Ater said, but there's much more room for improvement. He is excited about a recent movement of Hispanic churches starting other Hispanic churches and believes Texas Baptist Anglos could learn a thing or two from their Spanish-speaking brothers.
___The fact remains, however, that Texas Baptists face ample opportunities for church starting among all ethnic groups--Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians, Anglos and a host of others.
___"We are way, way behind in reaching Hispanics," Brooks added. "That's not just Baptists; it's pretty much across the board."
___Another facet is urbanization. "The population has moved very significantly from rural to urban settings, and the number of urban churches has not kept up with the population shift," Brooks added. "Many of our churches are in rural areas that are no longer population centers."
___This problem is compounded by the fact that Baptists have rural roots and traditionally have thrived in rural areas more than in cities, he said.
___"Every city of 100,000 or more has a need for new churches," Ater said, citing urgent needs in the state's largest urban centers, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, El Paso and the I-35 corridor that includes San Antonio and Austin.
___"El Paso is considered by some to be the most unevangelized city in the United States," Ater reported.
___Yet another facet is socio-economics. "Southern Baptists have done a fairly decent job working with the middle-class," Ater said. "But the middle class is not the majority."
___And while Texas Baptists have made inroads with lower-income Hispanics and immigrants, they have not fared well with lower-income Anglos, he added. "There's a large community of lower-economic Anglos, and we have almost no outreach into that community."
___Any way you slice it, the need for church starting is a Texas-sized challenge, said Bob Roberts, pastor of Northwood Church in Keller and one of Texas Baptists' leading advocates for church starting. Since starting Northwood 15 years ago, he has led the church to start about 30 other congregations while being heavily involved in world missions efforts as well.
___Texas today is home to more than 10 million unchurched people, Roberts noted. That's more unchurched people in Texas than there are residents in 42 other states, he added.
___Though it may be hard for rank-and-file Baptists to admit, statistical data proves that existing churches are not the best means to reach these people in need of the gospel, Roberts and other Texas missions experts agree.
___"If I had a friend out there, and he wanted to really, really grow a church, this is the only way to grow it," said Pete Castro, pastor of Calvario Bautista Iglesia in Corpus Christi, a 2-year-old church that has started 23 other congregations.
___"The most effective evangelism tool is new churches," said Lightsey, the Austin pastor. "New churches, for whatever reason, seem to be very effective in reaching out to the lost."
___There are several reasons for this, Ater added. Among them are factors such as an increased likelihood that members of new churches will know and communicate with unchurched friends and that the small-group settings found in new churches create environments more conducive to evangelism.
___"In churches that have existed for a longer period of time, the relationships of those members to non-Christians is smaller," he said. "And an existing church begins to have things within it that make it difficult for a non-churched person to come in. In a new church, the steps into the church are much smaller."
___For Roberts, these factors all add up to a theological imperative.
___"We have a small view of what the church really is," he said. "My goal is not to plant a church but to establish the kingdom of God. For me, it's driven out of that theological conviction."
___March 19 is Start-a-Church Commitment Sunday in Texas, an emphasis sponsored by the Baptist General Convention of Texas. The BGCT has a goal of starting more than 300 congregations across the state this year, in partnership with local churches, associations and national missions organizations. Sept. 17 has been designated New Church Launch Day. For more information about church-starting needs and opportunities in Texas, call the BGCT's Church Starting Center at (888) 244-9400.
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