Planting Growing Churches

Does America need more churches?

Yes!  The need for new churches in America has never been greater.  Consider the following:

• 4000 Churches close their doors every year in America!
• The Unchurched has grown by 92% in recent years.

• In America there are over 200 million people who do not have a personal relationship with Christ! 

• Since only China and India have larger populations than this, the U.S. is the 3rd largest mission field in the world! 

• Nearly 74% of all Americans have no meaningful church relationship! 

• One-half of all the churches in America did not add one new member through "conversion" growth during the last year. 

• No county in America has a greater percentage of churched people today than a decade ago.

• Evangelical churches have failed to gain an additional 2% of the American population in the past 50 years. In other words, we are not even reaching our own children! 

• North America is the ONLY continent where Christianity is not growing! 

• According to Barna Research, of the 350,000 churches in America: 
  • 80% have reached a plateau or are declining 
  • 15% are growing because of transfer growth 
  • 5% are growing because of conversion growth

• 17.7% of the US population attends church. This breaks down into 9% evangelical, 5.5% Catholic and 3.1% Mainline denominations.
• Nationwide, to just to keep up with population growth, we would need to plant 51,826 more churches than we did from 1994-2004. Including churches that were planted, this means we would have needed to plant over 100,000 churches!
• There are 195 million unchurched people making the U.S. the third largest mission field in the English-speaking world and the fifth largest globally.
  Kent Hunter
• 70 percent of the people in the U.S. have no meaningful church relationship.
  Robert Logan

• According to church growth leader C. Peter Wagner, "There is no more effective method of reaching people for Christ than the planting of vital, new churches." Consider these statistics:

  Þ On average, a church that is older than 10 years takes 89 attendees to reach one person for Christ.

  Þ A church that is 3 to 10 years old takes 7 attendees to reach one person for Christ.

  Þ A church that is 0 to 3 years old takes 3 attendees to reach one person for Christ.

Let us take a moment to introduce ourselves.  We are Jim & Sallie Carroll.  We have been married for 23 years and have 3 children.  Our oldest daughter Kira and her husband Scott have just given us our first grandchild (Click the Baby Kurtz link above to see the most adorable baby ever), our son Daniel recently graduated from Word Of Life Bible Institute and plans to attend Broome Community College in January, and our youngest daughter Rebekah has finished high school and is taking Cosmotology classes at BOCES in Liverpool, NY.  After serving as Senior Pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church for the past 17 years I have tendered my resignation.  While Sallie and I have loved our time there and leaving is difficult the Lord has called us into missionary church planting with American Mission for Opening Churches (AMOC for short).  AMOC is a mission agency founded by Lyle Anderson in 1943 dedicated to the planting of churches where the light of the gospel is needed.  For more information on AMOC you can go to their web site by clicking here.

This call to church planting has resulted from a growing burden we have felt over the past 2 years.  Each time we would travel through New England to visit my family we were struck with the great need that existed in New England for gospel preaching, bible believing churches.  Last summer we took a short drive through southern Maine and drove for a couple of hours and only passed 7 churches.  Four of which were some form of a cult, 2 were United Methodist, and one was a Union church. 

The need for new churches has never been greater.  As noted above, the unchurched in America has grown by 92% in recent years and over 50% of the unchurched live in the Northeast and West Coast of the United States.  Couple that with the fact that each year 4000 churches close their doors and it is apparent that what America needs is more churches and God has called us to be a part of meeting that need.

As we begin this new chapter in our ministry we covet your prayers as we begin to raise prayer and financial support. 

Pray that God would open up opportunities for us to speak in churches and share this burden with others.

Pray that God would make His will clear as to where exactly He would have us plant.

Pray that God would raise up many to covenant with us in prayer and others would commit to support us financially in this endeavor.

Pray that God would provide a core group of committed believers to assist us in the establishing of this church.

Finally, pray that God would already be preparing the hearts of those who need Him in the community He will be sending us to.

If you would like to partner with us in anyway please fill out the response form on this website.

We can also be reached via e-mail at pastorjcarroll@aol.com