The Vision and Strategy of Church Revitalisation

It is now widely accepted that there is a great need in Europe for church planting, and that a new church plant often sees growth through conversions. But if for every church planted, an older evangelical church disappears, then overall we are not seeing much real progress in penetrating a given country by establishing a network of churches.

In France, the National Council of Evangelicals (le CNEF) has the objective of seeing "one for ten thousand" i.e. the existence of one evangelical church on average for every ten thousand inhabitants. A good deal of effort is dedicated to church planting but we are becoming more aware that some churches planted as recently as the 1980s are slowly declining. The evangelism commission of the CNEF has been looking at this question and doing some research with the help of several denominations. This talk shares some of their initial findings.