Country Report USA – Felicity Dale

Current situation:

When people think of the United States, they think of a Christian country. 76% of Americans claim to be Christian today (compared to 86.2% in 1990). Around 25-35% claim to be Evangelical. What is tragic is that the churchgoing community has the same social indices as the non-Christian community—drug and alcohol abuse are about the same, Internet pornography the same, the divorce rate is even slightly higher. Only 4% of 18-35 year olds have a Biblical worldview. So this is a culture that is just one generation away from being post Christian. Most people think they know what Christianity is about and they have voted with their feet.

People are leaving the traditional church by the millions. So we are dealing with a very different situation in the United States to that which exists in most other parts of the world. There is a huge reservoir of people who used to be churchgoers, many of whom have not left church because they have lost their faith but they have left in order to preserve their faith. (Reggie McNeal: The Present Future). Many of them were leaders within traditional structures. And the Lord is leading many of them into house/simple churches.

According to the researchers there are now around 5 % of the adult population now attends the tightest definition of house church—somewhere between 6 and 12 million people. This is something only God could have done. It seems to be a true move of the Holy Spirit. Spontaneously, all over the country the Lord is telling people to start meeting in their homes. There is no central location or celebrity around which things have formed.

The Challenges:

Because so many people have left the traditional church there are two main problems:

1. Many of these churches just do what they have always known in traditional church within the four walls of their home.

2. The churches tend to be inward looking

Current Trends

1. Simple churches are becoming more missional in nature. There are now many stories of churches shifting their attention to the surrounding communities.

2. An increasing number of regional initiatives that draw networks of churches together, for conferences, for social justice issues etc. at a local level.

3. There are an increasing number of mega-churches who are seeing their inability to make disciples or to effectively reach out into society. Some of these are having dialog with and looking to simple churches for some kind of strategy to reach out into their communities.

4. Student initiatives in the universities.

We see these trends as very encouraging and indicative of what God is doing in the nation.