David Fairchild is back?

Posted by D. Goodmanson on May 27, 2006 in Church | 1 comment

i don’t know if it was Cawley’s intercessory prayer or the new digs, but it looks like Pastor Fairchild is back at blogging! Starts off swinging with Ways We Add to the Gospel…

Redeeming the City

Posted by D. Goodmanson on May 20, 2006 in Church | 2 comments

Resurgence Conference
Teacher: Tim Keller, Pastor Redeemer NY

Being the Church in our Culture was a great session at the Resurgence conference. Much of what was said I had heard from Keller prior, but what stuck with me was the idea of Redeeming the City. Keller said, “No other religion [except Christianity] has hope for this world.” Keller spoke about the type of eschatology that allows you to inspire people at their jobs, such as investment bankers, as to how this is intricately connected into the dominion mandate given by God to take care of this world. “Unless you see the Creation, Fall, Redemption and Restoration as declared in scripture, you will not have a theology to redeem this world through work.”

This drum beat of “Redeeming San Diego” continues to resonate with me. This last week, while I was on vacation, I continued to consider what it would look like to be a church focused on redeeming San Diego. How would we act? What would we value? What activities would our people be involved in? I’ll have to post more on this after I’ve spent more time reflecting‚Ķ

Keller presented 6 points to effectively reaching the cities for Christ.

Externally Focused Church Leaders

Posted by D. Goodmanson on May 20, 2006 in Church | 1 comment

I don’t recall who said it, but in a presentation at the Resurgence Conference, someone talked about External vs. Internal Church leaders. Who has examples of a group of leaders who are externally focused? At our church, most of the external leadership centers around our mecy ministries (homeless, teen mentoring, pregnancy crisis center, convalescent homes, etc.) Jamie Munson at Mars Hill serves on community boards and I know other churches have leadership get involved in these type of civic activity. I’d like to determine how to connect with business leaders in San Diego who have a passion for San Diego being redeemed.

What other types of external leaders should a church have? What would that look like? Should there be an equal amount of internal and external leadership in the church?

Oh the places we’ve gone…

Posted by D. Goodmanson on May 20, 2006 in Church | 3 comments

It’s been a great season of travel, family and learning. If you read my blog, you know I attended the National New Churches Conference in Orlando in April, the Reform & Resurge Conference in Seattle in May and I just returned from Palm Springs where we stayed at a vacation place my parents have. Earlier this month, we were very excited to have my parents and Roman’s birth mom Holly and her daughter here in San Diego for Roman’s dedication. I’ve uploaded some pictures of the trips and the dedication for friends and family to check out!

Photo Gallery

The State of the American Church – Why Church Planting is Critical to the Future of American Christianity

Posted by D. Goodmanson on May 16, 2006 in Church, Church Planting | 7 comments

National New Church Conference
Teacher: Dave Olson, Director of Church Planting for the Evangelical Covenant Church and Director of The American Church Research Project.

Many Christian leaders wonder whether planting new churches is necessary for the future of the American Church. They say: Don’t we have enough churches already? Aren’t most new churches very small? Most new churches don’t survive anyway, do they? Shouldn’t we focus instead on the small, struggling churches we already have?

42-45% of Americans say they go to church on Sunday according to George Barna and George Gallup. From 1991 to 2006 this number increased from 36% to 47%, this is an 11% increase (in a country with roughly 300 million people, this means 33 million people started to attend church. Olson believes these survey's are wrong and are greatly impacted by the halo effect. For example, of those surveyed, 54% said they voted in an area where only 46% actually did. Olson doesn't base his research on these polls but actual headcounts at 200,000 churches. [His question is, how many pastors ever under count attendance?] Some of Olson's findings include:

17.7% of the US population attends church. This breaks down into 9% evangelical, 5.5% Catholic and 3.1% Mainline denominations.

The rate of those who attend church is declining. In the West, there is a -1.2% decrease in the population of who attends church in the 1994-2004 timeframe. Nationwide, to just to keep up with population growth, we would need to plant 51,826 more churches than we did in this period. Including churches that were planted, this means we would have needed to plant over 100,000 churches! The greatest increase and conversion occurs in church plants. For more of the statistics, and for specific statistics for the top 80 Metro areas, go to The American Church.