LONG ISLAND - A CHURCH PLANTER'S DREAM

Nationwide church attendance in the United States is less than half of previous estimates, according to Dave Olson, director of church planting for the Evangelical Covenant Church, and director of the American Church Research Project.

According to a news release from Mission America Coalition, Olson addressed the Mission America Coalition annual conference on its closing day with groundbreaking new research about the state of the American church. Instead of relying on limited survey data which is then extrapolated to the entire population, Olson has worked for years to build a database of actual recorded attendance in over 300,000 churches across America.

And the findings are not pretty.

Here in our county for instance, in 2000 only 13.2% of the population attended church on any kind of regular basis. But of those,71% are Catholics.

No disrespect to anyone here and I don't want any threatening letters from zealous friends of the current Pope or any of his predecessors, but since many Catholics do not fully appreciate the Gospel yet, the bottom line for Suffolk County is that less than 4% of the population attend a Protestant Church and it means that less than that again are probably born again.

BINGO! We did it. We won the lottery!
Of all the places around this great nation we could have ended up, God has dropped us right in the middle of what is possibly the biggest mission field in America. There are over 1.5 million people in Suffolk and these statistics confirm that most of them don't attend church and the vast majority do not know Jesus.

Unlike many states, we don't have a church on every corner and you can't build a church by stealing people from other churches as hardly anyone is in church to start with.

This county is a church planter's dream - there is unlimited scope!

Now, how best to reap this vast, vast harvest???