Dr Paul Allen

The number of very large churches continues to increase, as our graphic dramatically illustrates. And within that group, the biggest churches continue to get bigger. In the past I’ve written about everything from sanctuary sizes (very few new ones over 5,000) to  the first megachurch (start with Pentecost when “about 3,000” were converted, per Acts 2:41) to global megachurches ( Korea and Nigeria are currently leading). But what about the people who attend really big churches? Fellow researcher Scott Thumma and I surveyed some 25,000 of them, with some fascinating discoveries: Nearly two-thirds of attenders have been at these churches 5 years or less. Many attenders come from other churches, but nearly a quarter haven’t been in any church for a long time before coming to a megachurch. New people almost always come to the megachurch because family, friends or coworkers invited them. Fifty-five percent of megachurch attenders volunteer at the church in some way (a ...

Image via Wikipedia Robert J. Thomas was haunted by the thought of Korea . A Welsh missionary to China, he knew that the people of the " Hermit Kingdom " needed the gospel. But Korea, observing how westerners had mistreated China, closed its doors to foreigners. Burning with evangelistic zeal, Robert felt he must do something about the people's ignorance of eternal life. Lacking Korean language material, Robert handed out tracts and New Testaments in Chinese. He soon had to return to China, where, the following year, his wife died. On this day, September 13, 1865 , he arrived on the coast of Korea and began to learn what he could about the people and their language. By his action, Robert became the first Protestant missionary to the ancient land, whose name means "chosen." Roman Catholics , however, had converted many Koreans starting in the late 1700s. They were so successful that in 1863 eight thousand were slaughtered by a government that feared foreign ...