DESPERATE EUROPE

According to the European Spiritual Estimate, there is on average only one Gospel-Oriented church  for every 27.749 people on the continent.  The orange areas on the map show nations where there is less than one church for more than 30000 people while the red areas are nations where there is less than one church for every 40.000 people!

Compare this to one church for every 1.766 people in China and one for every 2.413 people in India and Europe starts standing out as today's most desperate mission field!  

Our Archbishop of Research ;) has just released a short article summarizing the ESE results. Only 2 pages - but with the potential to change the way Europe is perceived around the world!! Jeff Fountain comments on it, too.

--- DEUTSCH ---

Nach den Ergebnissen der ESE Schätzung kommt in Europa eine zeugnishafte Gemeinde auf über 27.000 Einwohner. In den oben rot markierten Ländern kämen bis zu 40.000 Menschen auf eine solche Gemeinde. Vergleiche das mit Zahlen aus China (1.766 Einwohner auf eine Gemeinde) oder Indien (2.413) und es wird klar, das Europa Missionsfeld ist!

Hier ist Scotts jüngste englischsprachige Zusammenfassung der Ergebnisse.

Comments

[andiwolf]

maybe a real point to consider.. cu soon (pray for my pc - i'll do for yours :) )

[Marc van der Woude]

Mea Culpa. You are right. This speedreading journalist scratched the surface, while we all know beauty is in the (research) details. ;-)

I just checked the basic research we did in Utrecht, and of those 80 churches in town 10 are actively evangelizing or church planting. This is a factor 1:8, which comes close to your 1:10 estimate. So let's assume there are 500 churches in the Netherlands who are actively concerned about their community - wow, guess we should call for national repentance then. This is pretty bad. It puts the Netherlands on the same level as the Catholic nations and the Balkan. I better stay here then instead of moving to Germany or Norway.

[andiwolf]

Speaking about Holland then and taking your figure of 4000 existing churches - what the ESE would suggest then is that 9/10th of all existing churches are not perceived as being actively concerned about their surrounding community. Talking ESE-methodology, remember that it is estimate-based and does not tell you "the objective truth" in the first place, but it does tell you about the general gut feeling of the respondents. Following the "wisodom of crowds" philosophy (which is not undisputed of course), this would actually indicate "truth" in the second place. Keep the context! There are very interesting lessons to learn from the ESE, but it cannot easily be compared 1:1 to a "church count". :)

[andiwolf]

BEWARE! Whenever or whereever survey figures are cited you NEED to understand the figures according to the definition that is used in this study! This is even true for journalists my friend ;) You are talking about "churches" and I am citing the ESE which talks about "Gospel-Oriented churches" defined as "A fellowship of people following Jesus Christ who are actively concerned about the people in their community and their relationship with Jesus Christ." The difference is obvious and has a huge impact especially in two ways: 1. The ESE estimates ONLY "actively concerned" churches, not "all existing churches". 2. The ESE includes this type of churches independently from their confessional background, ergo it is much more inclusive than a DAWN typical census.

[Marc]

One church on every 40.000 Dutchmen? Impossible. That means a total of 400 in the whole nation. In the DAWN research of ten years ago this was still 5.000. I know church membership is declining, but not that exponentially. So you can multiply it with a factor ten, which brings the total number of churches in the Netherlands at 4.000. From a SCP perspective we would go for 16.000 on a population of 16 million, which means that every existing church should plant four other churches. This matches exactly with our local research in Utrecht: there are currently 80 churches, but we need 320 to match with the population, which is also a factor 1:4.