Lessons From the EastSample

A Lot to Learn

Church leaders have been praying for revival in America, and we’ve been working hard to help our churches grow, but we’re falling behind. The Pew Research Center reports that between 2007 and 2014, the number of people who claim to be Christians dropped almost eight percent. In light of this decline, we might be encouraged to learn that those who identify themselves as evangelicals fell less than one percent.

In my lifetime the United States has shifted from being the most prolific nation in the world in sending missionaries to being the third most unreached nation in the world. When I first became a pastor, I didn’t realize that I’d become a missionary by staying in America instead of leaving America for a distant land.

Outside our borders, however, Jesus is capturing hearts and the church is exploding, especially in Africa, Asia, and South America. For instance, in 1900, Africa had only 8.7 million Christians, but today, the number is almost 400 million, and some estimates are half a billion. In Korea, the number of Christians has grown from two percent in 1945 to thirty percent today.

For years, American church leaders assumed we were the experts, we had the right theology and strategy, and we had all the resources we and the rest of the world needed. We’ve conducted an incredible array of conferences and seminars on how to lead and manage our churches. The problem is that we have a closed system. We’ve been searching for answers from each other, but not from outside our borders. We’ve sent missionaries and resources overseas, but we haven’t listened to the leaders from those countries. In the meantime, the American church has become stagnant while the global church is seeing phenomenal growth. Church leaders on other continents are leaving us in the dust. The solution? We’ve been givers, but now it’s time to become receivers. We have a lot to learn . . . but from them, not from each other.