"It is our opinion, and that of the Future Travelers group, that the prevailing, contemporary church-growth approach to church will have significant cultural appeal — marketability, if you will — to about 40 percent of the American population. (This is informed opinion, anecdotal in nature because to date there is no hard research on this.) This is not attendance; we know that attendance in these forms of churches is far less than that. This means that the prevailing models of evangelistic churches could likely max out at around 40 percent of the population, perhaps 50 percent at the very best.4 However we cut it, it leaves us with two major problems. Strategic Problem The first one is a strategic problem. Most of our churches believe and act as if modeling on (and perfecting) the successful contemporary church approach will resolve their problems of mission. But even if they could all become successful megachurches, the vast majority of churches cannot and should not. The financial capital, managerial infrastructure, leadership ability, communication strategies, and amount of artistic talent are huge in megachurches — all making for a model that is not very reproducible. So we have a vexing situation where probably 90 percent or more of evangelical churches in America (and other Western contexts) are aiming at becoming a model that not only is improbable for the vast majority but also (even if they could crack the codes) effectively would still just be competing with other churches for the same 40 percent.5 This should concern us very deeply. Anyone with a sense of strategy should be immediately alert at this point. Why? Because all our missional eggs are in one ecclesiological basket! We have no diversity of options — most of our current practices are simply variations of the same model. This is not to say it’s wrong or not used by God, and so on. Please don’t hear us wrong here. Clearly, God uses the contemporary church. It is simply to say it is not sufficient to the increasingly missional challenge now set before us. It was psychologist Abraham Maslow who noted that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. The tool itself begins to define us and determine our approaches. However, if we are going to rise to the situation we face, we are going to need more tools. More disturbing, perhaps, is that this dearth of options demonstrates a serious poverty of imagination in the way we think about the church and mission and indicates why we desperately need to innovate.....
As Jesus’ sent people, we have to ask ourselves, what about the possible 60 percent of people who for various reasons report significant alienation from precisely the contemporary church-growth model(s) we rely so heavily on? What will church be for these people? What is good news going to sound like for them? And how are they going to access the gospel of Jesus in ways that are culturally meaningful for them? The reality is, if we expect more variations of the prevailing practices to reach into increasingly de-churched and unchurched populations, we are fooling ourselves. We’re avoiding the missionary call of the church to take Christ’s message to the people and nations....
This is exactly the issue we face. We are all competing in the red waters of the 40 percent while the 60 percent remains largely untouched."
(Alan Hirsch & David Ferguson. "On The Verge")
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