Did you know that Southern Baptists, together through our Cooperative Program giving and our International Mission Board (IMB) work, currently have some 3,600 missionaries now serving in 155 countries? These missionaries are working overtime to reach the lost and spread the Good News of Jesus to people who have never heard the Gospel.
If you go to the IMB’s website (imb.org), you can find out how to take part in specific prayer efforts and find out how you personally can participate in this Gospel work. There is even a program called the “Master’s Program,” by which people who are 55-plus in age can participate in a journeymen-program-like missions deployment. Yes, people of every age-stage can participate in missions work.
As Southern Baptists, we have been and will always be a Great Commission people, trying to reach the lost all around the world, near and far. At the same time, we are a people who want to make sure that we continue to disciple and bring up the next generation of Christians within our own families and churches.
We never want to “lose the reached.” Yet recent data shows that we may be at risk of that. In his podcast “The Briefing,” Albert Mohler recently analyzed U.S. Census data and other polling information now available concerning faith and religion. One observable trend among people is those who are self-professing Christians, used to attend church regularly, but no longer do. A pastor described this group as the “dones.”
There are many people who today feel “done” with church. A recent article by Lifeway reported that, “On average, U.S. Protestant churches report current attendance at 85 percent of their typical Sunday morning crowds in January 2020, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.” Somehow we have come to a place in the church today in which we are “losing the reached.” With the phrase “losing the reached,” I, of course, am not saying that saved people are losing their salvation. Instead, I refer to those Christian believers who have dropped out of church.
This phenomenon of church attenders dropping out has happened with regularity among young people. An estimated two-thirds of young adults who attend church for at least a year in high school will stop attending church regularly for at least a year between the ages of 18 and 22.
We are seeing far too many people of all ages simply check out. It’s possible COVID closures broke people of the good habit of going to church (Heb. 10:25); or religious scandals have turned the “dones” off to organized Christianity. It’s also possible a bad personal experience has become a barrier to attending.
Whatever the case, the “dones” need the church, and the church needs them. Pastors and church members must reckon with this trend of the “dones” and prayerfully seek the Lord in how we can best reach them. The recent Oklahoma Baptists’ Advance Conference talked about the link between evangelism and discipleship, and that holds the key to reaching both the “nones” and the “dones.” Moreover, both groups want to and need to see Christians living with better moral integrity.
To that end, together let’s renew our focus to reach the lost and to recapture in church those who are followers of Jesus. Together, Southern Baptists can continue to be a force for good, one that goes with the Good News of Jesus and that “Makes disciples of all nations…” (Matt. 28).
