I’ve started reading Mark Driscoll’s Confessions of a Reformission Rev., his story of the birth and growth of his church in Seattle, Mars Hill Church.
In the introduction he talks about Seattle:
‘one of the nation’s least-churched cities, where only 8 percent of the population is evangelical Christian and 86 percent does not attend a worship service of any religion during an average week‘
(Confessions, p. 9)
Compare and contrast to the goal of the Sydney Anglican church mission (note that this is the goal, not the actual mission statement itself):
The second step was to adopt a primary ‘goal’ to help focus all the activities of the Diocese’s congregations and organisations. So, under God, and together with other like-minded churches, Sydney Anglicans have adopted ‘10% in 10 years’ as a memorable slogan to summarise their aims.
The Goal >>
To see at least 10% of the population of the region of the Sydney Diocese in Bible-based churches in 10 years.
(http://your.sydneyanglicans.net/mission/articles/what_is_the_mission/)
So in the US an un-churched city has ‘only’ 8 percent in church, while we’re hoping and praying to reach 10% of the population.
And people say that Australia’s culture is a copy of America’s.
I’m wondering about his figures.
Does that mean, assuming most of the 8% that are evangelicals go to church during an average week, say 7/8ths, that there are more church-going evangelicals in Seattle than church going anything-else?
I doubt it. Where’s the glitch?
He goes on to talk about other churches in the area that he visited from time to time to see what they were doing.
He doesn’t go into lots of detail, but you get the feeling that the liberal churches were largely empty, whilst the more orthodox churches, whilst perhaps a little misguided on christology or ‘reformission’, were reasonably healthy in terms of numbers. His beef, of course, is that they were comfortable communities, not missional.
So it could be right, I suppose. Hard to tell.