The Master’s Plan Network
Our Nazarene Past…and Preferred Future!
Let’s start with some good news… The Church of the Nazarene has added 328,834 new Nazarenes to our churches in Canada and the USA in the last 10 years…
… but the bad news is that the Church of the Nazaren has lost 291,411… in the last 10 years. (56,434 deaths and 234,977 removals)
More good news… Nazarene's have started 1,151 new churches of the Nazarene in North America since 1994! That’s terrific! In fact, over 50% of all new Nazarenes reported added to our membership in the last 10 years have come from these new churches! God has truly helped us…
Now, for the sad, bad news… we have closed, in the last 10 years, 1,150 churches across North America… so we have a grand total, net gain, after all of our work, after all of our evangelism efforts and planting of new churches -- of 1 whole church! In 1996 we had 5,110 churches in North America… and today we have 5,111!
Thank God for all of those new starts or where would we be? In fact, since 1908, The USA/Canada Church of the Nazarene has now disorganized more churches (5,238) than are currently active (5,111). Not exactly GREAT COMMISSION stats but that is the sad reality we face.
In any given year less than half of all churches have an increase in worship attendance (only 44% show an increase over the previous years attendance). And yet, we know that 95% of the US population lives within 20 miles of a Nazarene church! Such is the state of the great Church that you and I love so much!
It has come to this – we’ve got to pray!!!... and we’ve got to Make Disciples who will Make Disciples!
And we’ve got to work… better and smarter than we ever have worked. And we’ve got to start doing some things radically different!
Here’s the FAITH CHALLENGE SCENARIO we dreamed up… right now, across the planet we have 18,000 Nazarene churches with a little over 1.5 million members. That is 13,000 international churches and 5,111 churches in No. America… for a grand total of a little over 18,000 churches.
What if we challenged the 18,000 pastors in the 18,000 churches world-wide that we have now to raise up even just 1 DiscipleMaking pastor and plant even just 1 church in the next 3 years… and then we repeated that process every 3 years? In 21 years, if Jesus tarries, it would look like this:
Years
1-3 18,000 36,000 DiscipleMaking Pastors & churches
4-6 36,000 72,000
7-9 72,000 144,000
10-12 144,000 288,000
13-15 288,000 576,000
16-18 576,000 1,152,000
19-21 1,152,000 2,304,000!! Total DiscipleMaking pastors and churches that are raising up DiscipleMakers of DiscipleMakers!
2.3 Million pastors and churches! … in 21 years! What a God-sized, yet reasonable, attainable goal!
And this doesn’t even factor in that once this thing gets into the DNA of our denomination, there will be some pastors that will be used by God to raise up multiple pastors and plant several churches in a 3 year span. Multiplication, rather than just duplication or replication, could blow us away… especially if a few of these guys were really doing The Master’s Plan and they were developing their 12 soul-winning disciples and their 144 soul-winning disciples of their disciples and their 1,728 and beyond! If The Master’s Plan were to really take hold in our denomination worldwide the results are totally unimaginable! This seems like a God-sized vision!
Even if each church just averaged 100 we would be ministering to: 230,400,000! Almost a quarter of a billion people! Not bad from where we are today with 18,000 churches and under 2 million people! This can be done! And by that time with DiscipleMaking in our blood and in the prevailing church culture of our denomination… how many of our churches would NOT grow past 100?! We honestly think that it would be the rare exception that didn’t grow past 100 or 200.
We think that this is not only a very modest, doable goal, with Jesus’ power - it is absolutely essential and it is about time, after all, that we get after the one thing that Jesus told us to do… make disciples!
