All About Grace wrote:
"bapmom,
Again we can agree to disagree.
Honest question for you: do you find something wrong with the fact your website claims you have had 53,800+ professions of faith and 16,000 baptisms in the last decade?
I am sure that with that many people coming to Christ your church must be running 18,000+ on an average Sunday (that is assuming only 1/3 of those professions "stuck").
I know I am walking on shaky ground here in certain brands of fundamentalism, but I just want to know your honest opinion about these numbers. It is a bit frightening to me."
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(for some reason the quote option is gone at the top of the posts for me.....but Ive tried.
Now, let me address this a little bit. Especially since others here feel this is a fair question, and I can't fault anyone for that. Im not sure why the webmaster said "the last decade", but our church has been in existence for over 30 years. I do know the man, though, and if you all feel like you need me to I can go ask him about it tomorrow. Maybe we've only been keeping records for a decade.
Otherwise, I can tell you that for quite awhile we were running upwards of 800, not including our bus kids (though I don't know why we can't include them.) However, about 8 years ago we had a church split, and we almost went under. Times were very hard, but God has blessed, and now hopefully there are TWO good churches in our area rather than just one. (Actually there are more than just our two churches of course, but please bear with me as Im only speaking of what happened at MY church.)
ANd yes, C4K, we very often have weeks where we see upwards of 100 saved....but we have 5 different soul winning times each week, and several older people who devote huge amounts of their free time just passing out tracts on the street and telling people the gospel. Each one of these gets turned in as convert slips and we go visit them later. We try very hard to keep up with disciplship, and actually lately it has been a big emphasis. You are very right in that we don't see all the results we'd like to see. Remember too, Billy Graham gave up on our city after 3 days, saying Milwaukee was enslaved to alcohol. He was right, too. So yes, many people make professions and yet continue to struggle in their addiction. We now have our Reformers Unanimous program going to provide more help in that area.
We have many kids who have over the years gone through our school and graduated and moved away.
Should I feel safe enough here now to admit that in the past there have been people in our soul winning groups who just try for the name on the convert slip? I'll admit to being pretty sure that that goes on sometimes. It's a burden that I carry daily, believe me. I struggle each week before my own time for going out.....I do not want to fall into that trap. But I can also tell you that I personally know that those who fill out those slips are visited each week, and there are many who do come to church. Actually most of those people who might have been guilty of pushing for a quick decision were the ones "weeded out" in the split.
I think one thing about this is, we have a very active bus ministry. We see MANY children come through, and many of them get saved. However, they don't always have the choice of whether or not they continue to come. They also mostly come from the very poor side of town...not sure how else to describe it. But many times the only way they have of getting to our church is on our bus. THere are churches closer over there that they often wind up in as they grow older.
Those are my reasonings behind this. There might be more, better ones even....not sure. But I can tell you that our preacher is NOT teaching a 1-2-3-pray after me method. We just work hard, and meet a whole lot of people.
