This article as actually posted in May on the UMC website, but someone just forwarded it to me and I thought it worthy of this space.
United Methodist membership down, constituency up
For me, it raises the same sort of issues the last article raised. When we are looking towards the future of the church, are we asking the right questions?
Prepare the Way for the Lord [Paperback]
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Prepare to receive Christ this Advent with the message of John the Baptist
and best-selling author and pastor Adam Hamilton in Prepare the Way for the
Lord...
3 days ago
3 comments:
The 2 articles seem to reflecting the same thing. It shows your new role as a discipleship pastor has some big opportunities and challenges. It would be interesting to have some new statistics on how many people are in various statuses of discipleship a church. What we would like to know is not just how many members and constituents we have, but also how many of those members and constituents are involved in small groups, bible study, worship attendance, stewardship, charity work, etc. It would make it easier to evaluate what we are BECOMING as a church and as individuals, which seems like a more important question than where we are right now.
P.S. to Comment #1: Quantity is not all that counts in evaluating where we are. One can think of very large churches that may not be moving in directions we would like. It will require a lot of prayer for wisdom to make appropriate adjustments to changes taking place in the society as a whole.
That is exactly the sort of thing we are working on at University and a large amount of the work I did in Corpus Christi at Grace. United Methodists neeed to take pride in the methodical nature and develop systems for discipleship. Although only God can truly measure one's level of discipleship, as church leaders, we can develop programs and benchmarks to help people determine whether they are moving forward.
You are right in that it doesn't matter how many members or consituents we have, it matters how many people are becoming disciples.
will
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