Someone (sorry, forgotten who, sometime in September 2004) responded to the following:

‘Does the Australian Church have a Future?’ http://jmm.org.au/articles/8517.htm

* In New Zealand and Australia, as in all western >countries, church attendance has declined since the >1960s. In Australia, 40% in 1961 claimed to attend >church at least monthly, down to 24% by 1980 and >20% by 1999. New Zealand figures are similar.

* In Britain church attendance declined from 18% to >7.5% and Canada from 55% to 22%. Even in the USA, >often seen as immune from these trends, it has fallen >from 49% in 1958 to 40% in 2000.

Why?

According to Patrick Johnstone, author of “The Church is Larger Than You Think”, and a missions researcher, the following are some of the important trends in evangelical Christianity world-wide:

1.) Evangelical Christianity has grown slowly but steadily in the West, while the rest of Western Christianity has shrunk significantly

2.) The real growth of Evangelical Christianity in recent years has been in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In 1960, non-Western Evangelicals were around half as numerous as those in the West; in the year 2000, they will be 4 times, and in 2010, 7 times as numerous

3.) Although Christianity as a whole is growing slightly slower than Islam, Protestant Christianity is expanding faster than Islam at 2.9% per year, which is almost double the rate of population growth, currently at 1.7%

4.) The Roman Catholic church is expanding more slowly than the population, which means that the percentage of Catholics in the population is decreasing. This is mainly due to the secularization in Europe and the trend to Evangelicalism in Latin America

5.) Protestantism is growing almost twice as fast as the world population, but this is almost entirely due to Evangelicals. Non-Evangelical Protestant churches are shrinking significantly. “Liberal theology is being preached in ever-shrinking churches in increasingly empty church buildings.”

6.) Evangelical Christianity is expanding more than three times as fast as the world population, and is hence the only religious group in the world with significant growth through conversion, at a rate almost double that of Islam

It could be said that the 1960s marked the period of spiritual breakthrough in Africa, even if the spread of Evangelical Christianity has continued. The massive growth followed the end of colonial rule, as most African nations became independent states. Never before has there been such a change in a whole continent, with Christianity winning over 50% of the population within a century.

Latin America was a Catholic continent for the majority of the past 500 years. In this century, however, the number of Evangelicals has grown from under 250,000 in 1900 to over 40 million in 1990, with over 60 million probably in the year 2000. On a typical Sunday, more Latin Americans attend an Evangelical service than a Catholic church. Even according to conservative estimates, in which enthusiastic exaggerations of membership numbers such as that of the Assemblies of God were corrected from 16 to 8 million, there are more evangelical Christians in Brazil than in all of Europe

In addition to the growth of the church in South Korea and under the 50 million expatriate Chinese and the Javanese in Indonesia, there was significant church growth in China after Mao’s death. As a result, there are now more Evangelicals in Asia than North America. Singapore’s churches are now the most evangelistically active in the world, with one missionary sent out per 1,000 Christians. Seven of the world’s ten largest churches are in Seoul alone, a city in which there was not even a single church 110 years ago. (Source and information: Patrick Johnstone, in: “the Church is bigger than you think”, WEC,Bulstrode, Gerrands Cross, Bucks, SL9 8SZ, Great Britain)

Peter Wagner, a noted professor and author who has spent over 40 years in a seminary environment, recently published a book titled Churchquake, in which he writes a chapter on Seminary education. In that chapter he jokingly uses the term “cemeteries” for seminaries and lists what he believes are the “seven tombstone markers” of seminaries.

Academic achievement is considered more important than ministry skills

The highest priority is often to impress academic peers, not to train students

The academy irresistibly tends to entrench irrelevance through faculty tenure and required courses

Seminary faculty members rarely are or have been pastors themselves, and almost none have been successful pastors

Seminaries are accountable to accrediting associations, not to the churches for which they are presumably training pastors

The nature of academia is to produce a critical spirit throughout the community

Seminary training is pricing itself out of the market

In Dr. Wagner’s book he quotes Reggie McNeal,

‘Where will the training for apostolic leadership take place? Traditional credentialing processes will, for the most part, find it extraordinarily difficult to rise to this challenge. Typically, in the prevailing church culture, Bible colleges, seminaries, and denominational program support have served as the training grounds. But only the most dynamic and innovative of these old training institutions will maintain viability as credible sources of ministry preparation.’

Despite Dr. Wagner’s long tenure at Fuller Theological Seminary, he has concluded that seminaries as we know them are dinosaurs and is now in the process of starting his own school in Colorado Springs, CO to try and remedy the problems he has observed first-hand.

Dr. Phillip Walker, President of International Christian Ministries, a ministry that is training pastors and church leaders in the third world states,

‘As theological institutions around the world launch into the 21st Century there is a growing chorus calling for substantial changes in the way we train the leaders for our churches and denominations. The rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in many parts of the world has made our traditional models obsolete and inefficient. There are those in the chorus of voices calling for changes who say the current models are not only inefficient but ineffective. Regardless of the reason, theological education as we know it, is going through a major paradigm shift. This shift will leave many institutions grounded on the shoals of inconsequence as new models arise to meet the challenge.’

Dr. Ralph Winter, the head of the U.S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena, CA goes so far as to say, ‘…to the degree the U.S. theological institutions successfully export their model of training to where the church was growing the most rapidly would be to the degree it slowed church growth.’

The answer to the problems of pastors and seminaries appears obvious. Because it is unlikely that the traditional training institutions have the capacity to change, new training institutions will emerge to meet the very real needs of pastors today.” (quoted from International Graduate School of Ministry – http://www.igsmin.com/public_html/aboutus.htm)