Nashville Doesn’t Need Anymore Churches

About a year ago I went to a meeting held by Louie Giglio, the popular speaker and founder of the Passion movement in this country. This is a movement where college kids come together for a two or three day worship experience. Giglio was in town promoting the event and had called several pastors and youth pastors together. When he gave his pitch to us, one of the things he kept saying is that “Nashville doesn’t need anymore churches.” I thought that was very interesting in light of what happened next.

It wasn’t three or four months later that I got a phone call from a friend of mine who was coming to Nashville to start an extension of North Point, a church that Louie Giglio is a member of and where he frequently speaks. I thought, Louie and Andy Stanley need to talk more. Now that’s probably a harsh judgment, but I thought it was interesting that a person would make such an emphasis on the point that Nashville doesn’t need anymore churches, and then all of a sudden three months later, his church is starting an extension from Atlanta to Nashville. What does that tell me? It tells me that Louie wasn’t being careful enough about what he had to say.

It is a great question; Does Nashville need anymore churches? It’s an important question for me, since I am the pastor of a brand new church; a church started out of the very sudden ending of one ministry. The Gathering is a new church that started through spontaneous combustion. By that I mean a bunch of people getting together and creating a space and an experience for people who felt shut out of their church. That kind of group is just up my alley.

Seventeen years ago, my wife and I came to Nashville and started a new church for people who felt shut out of the traditional church. Little did I know that I would ever come to a place where I would start another church for the same group of people, in the same town, yet 20 miles away. But here I am, the pastor of a new, exciting, growing church meeting in a theatre with two other churches. So in one theatre we now have three churches meeting. All around, meeting in the Brentwood/Franklin area of Nashville, are other new churches; probably 10-20 that I know of, maybe more.

What I hear people saying constantly is, “There are way too many churches. It seems like everyone is moving here to start a church” The truth of the matter is, there aren’t way too many churches; not here, not in Memphis, or Knoxville, or Chattanooga, or Louisville, or Birmingham, or New York, or Chicago, or Indianapolis, or any other major population center in this country. As a matter of fact, there are a third fewer churches today in Nashville, per capita than there were 50 years ago. Think of it. With a population of over 300 million in our country, there are fewer churches today across the board, to serve the population, than were here 50-60 years ago.

Not only are there fewer churches, but the churches that are here, are sicker than ever before. Few of the churches that exist have any capacity to reach outside their own group. The church is calcified in its community. They are closed-in groups with family webs who only attract people like them and only attract people related to them in some cases, by blood.

So does Nashville need more churches? The answer is absolutely not, if you’re talking about the kind of churches that we had 10, 20, 30 years ago. But does Nashville need vibrant, vital communities of faith who love Jesus Christ and who are on mission, that believe they are a part of a revolutionary movement that started 2,000 years ago, that continue to grow and burgeon around the world, except in places like America where we’ve gotten too stodgy and staid in the way we do church?

As a matter of fact that is our problem. All we do is “do” church, or “go to” church, when what we’ve always been called to be by our Leader is to “be” the church. At The Gathering, we gather to go. We gather to worship God, to go worship God everywhere else. At The Gathering we see everything as worship. Work is worship. Play is worship. Raising my family is worship. Everything is done before an audience of One as an act of worship, love, and devotion for God.

So does Nashville need more churches? You bet! Let’s start as many as we can who are vibrant and vital.

One of the things I love about being in a theatre with two other churches is to appreciate their differences. But both churches love Jesus Christ and love people. And so we’re filling up the largest theatre in the Mid State area with happy, excited, laughing people. Three different churches, three different personalities, three very different philosophies of ministry, but three amazing centers of God’s goodness where people find God, learn how to follow Christ and are challenged to dream.

Yeah, we need some more churches. Want to start one? Let me know. I’ll help you.

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