Why Church Planting? Answer: Least Evangelical U.S. Metro Areas

Least Evangelical U.S. Metro Areas By now many of you have heard about or seen JD Payne's compilation of 2000 data regarding evangelicals. I recognize the data is 10 years old but it's still stunning. In his post he mentions that new data is being researched this year. He lists the top 30 metro areas with least percentage of evangelicals. Of particular interest to me is to see so many Empire State cities: #6 New York (and surrrounding area), #11 Albany and the tri-city area, #15 Glens Falls (a very small city, definitely not urban), #17 Utica-Rome, #19 Syracuse, #24 Rochester and #25 Binghamton. Many here still think of the area as heavily churched, or in decline but no worse than anyone else. I hear all the time, "There's a church on every corner. Why do we need new churches?"  What they need to realize is that the canary in the mine died years ago when our "vibrant" churches were busy having worship wars, bickering about charismatic issues and swapping church members. This data is from 2000. It didn't happen in 2000. It began decades earlier. So if you were a church leader in the 1980's-90's (probably earlier), the fruit of your labor, or inattentiveness, resulted in 3.7% evangelical population, which is about 5300 people out of a population of 142,000. Upstate New York is so desperate for new healthy churches right now. Thank God for courageous leaders like J-Stinz, Mazz and others who are attempting to stem the tide. What we don't need is missionaries from the south who don't connect with the culture. What we do need is for the Christians and church leaders of upstate NY to recognize the urgency of the situation. On second thought, maybe we do need leaders from the south — the global south. We need the churches of our communities to critically and extensively examine their effectiveness for ministry and retool themselves. We don't need to ask whether what we are doing is working or not. Apparently, it's not. That is self evident from the data. We need many of the churches and denominations in our area to plant new churches — NOW. If not you, then who and if not now, then when? Here is the list, taken without permission from JD Payne's blog. (Thank you Dr. Payne for making this information available.) Go visit his site for more information to download. U. S. Metro Area Total Evangelical Percentage Evangelical Church to Population Ratio Provo-Orem, Utah 0.6% 1:18,427 Pittsfield, Massachusetts 1.5% 1:9640 Barnstable-Yarmouth, Massachusetts 1.5% 1:8889 Providence-Warwick-Pawtucket, Rhode Island 1.7% 1:8230 Springfield, Massachusetts 1.9% 1:9814 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-CT-PA 2.3% 1:8517 Salt Lake City-Ogden, Utah 2.3% 1:9808 Boston-Worcester-Lawrence-Lowell-Brockton, Massachusetts 2.5% 1:7786 New London-Norwich, Connecticut 2.5% 1:6477 Hartford, Connecticut 2.7% 1:7557 Albany-Schenectady-Troy, New York 2.7% 1:5837 Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, Pennsylvania 2.8% 1:6577 Burlington, Vermont 2.9% 1:6630 Dubuque, Iowa 3.1% 1:6857 Glens Falls, New York 3.1% 1:4288 Scranton-Wilkes-Barre-Hazelton, Pennsylvania 3.1% 1:4733 Utica-Rome, New York 3.4% 1:4837 Philadelphia-Wilmington-Atlantic City, PA-NJ-DE 3.6% 1:5704 Syracuse, New York 3.7% 1:5049 Bangor, Maine 3.8% 1:3535 Portland, Maine 3.8% 1:4580 Laredo, Texas 3.9% 1:4598 Reading, Pennsylvania 4% 1:4018 Rochester, New York 4.1% 1:5084 Binghamton, New York 4.4% 1:3504 Reno, Nevada 4.6% 1:4715 Salinas, California 4.7% 1:3686 Lewiston-Auburn, Maine 5% 1:4152 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 5% 1:3978