EVANGELISM?
A 4-year study funded by the Lily Endowment designed to identify and analyze highly effective examples of evangelism by congregations in 7 mainline denominations reached two primary findings: (1) Of the 30,000 churches that qualified for the Mainline Evangelism Project, only 1/2 of 1% (.0005%) are baptizing a significant number of adults (conversion baptisms). This translates to 150 churches of a qualifying survey pool of more than 30,000. The average age of churches qualifying in the study as evangelistic was 89 years.
(Leadership Network Advance 8/22/08)
