I've already addressed the question, "why am I planting a church in San Angelo". You can Click here to read that.
Generally, there are two primary arguments against starting another church.
1) "There are already so many churches here in our town."
2) "How will the new church be any different from the existing churches?"
Today I want to try to address the first argument.
There is an old debate for any city in America . . . especially a city located in the "Bible belt". The push back to starting a church usually goes something like this: "Since there are so many churches in our town, why would you start another one?" On the surface this seems like a logical argument.
Seating Capacity
In San Angelo there are around 130 different churches. Now that's a lot of churches! Isn't that enough to serve a town of 90,000 people? Actually, not even close!
Think about it. Let's figure up the potential church seating capacity in San Angelo. Even if every church auditorium could seat 200 (and that's an extremely generous number), San Angelo has the church seating capacity of 26,000. That means we can currently seat less than 29% of the city!
Multiple services can increase our potential capacity. However, many churches that offer multiple services have done so to increase their style or schedule options not their seating capacity. The truth is most church auditoriums are at half capacity during a given service.
So while we might pray "God reach this entire city!", we don't have near the seating capacity for the city to attend church.
Impact
Research consistently reveals that new church plants have a higher ratio of people giving their life to Christ than churches which have been in existence for several years. Check out these amazing stats.
"The single most evangelistic methodology under heaven is planting new churches." - C. Peter Wagner
Knowing the tendency for new church plants to see a significantly higher ratio of people coming to Christ, why aren't we planting more churches?
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