TODAY’S POST IS WRITTEN BY DAVID DIXON, EPD DISTRICT TEAM
When you travel through Eastern Pennsylvania what do you see?
As a part of the district team, I have the privilege of traveling to meet with pastors, church planters, and church leaders across our region.
Maybe it’s the church planter in me, but sometimes when I am driving around the district my heart gets heavy and is drawn to the streets and neighborhoods where there are not enough churches to reach that community. Sometimes I just pray and dream aloud: “God, what do you see here? How would you use us to reach this city?”
Our Region’s Reality
The reality is that in Eastern PA there are not enough churches to reach the number of people that live here—let alone keep up with population growth. According to the 2020 Census, there are now more than 13 million people living in our state. Of these, 9.2 million of them live in counties that make up the Eastern PA District, up 175,000 people in the last 10 years. This means that 70% of the state’s population lives in our half of the state.
Consider those numbers alongside data, from groups like the Association of Religious Data Archives (ARDA) and MissionInsite (ACS), which tells us depending on your location anywhere between 55-70% of people aren’t involved in a religious community of any kind. The picture becomes clear that there are multitudes of people in Eastern PA not being reached with the good news of Jesus.
In areas experiencing population growth, there is even a greater need for churches. The city of Philadelphia itself is home to 1.6 million people (up 77,000 from 2010) and to seven Alliance churches. If you add to the city the surrounding counties of Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery, the population surges to 4.2 million people with only 11 Alliance churches. This means that we have 77 Alliance churches reaching the 5 million people outside of the city and only 11 reaching the 4.2 million in the city.
We could share more data like this for areas and regions like the Northern Tier, Adams County, Lehigh Valley, and Scranton where the number of people doesn’t match the number of churches.
I know we aren’t the only churches in these streets and neighborhoods, but there are so many who need to hear and see the love of Jesus. People need Gospel communities to experience what God is really like.
A Holy Passion
I don’t share these stats with you as a form of a guilt trip, but rather that we would catch a glimpse of the magnitude of the harvest fields and that it will stir a holy passion within us to see things be different. Jesus said, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
It’s going to take Jesus working in us—His church—to see new workers equipped and sent out to reach new people. We need to ask Him to transform our hearts so that a desire to work to see the Gospel multiplied into new communities will spring up.
How We Can Engage
Ask Questions
We can engage Jesus in this work by looking to the harvest and asking ourselves and our churches, “Where is Jesus working? How would He want us to view our community and region?” We can make this practical by sending people out to learn more about different aspects of the community that we live in. Or we can look at the demographic and spiritual survey data of people in our regions.
The district office can help you get demographic data for your community through MissionInsite. As we understand our harvest field, we can begin to pray earnestly for the needs of our communities and regions.
Train Your People
We can help raise workers for the harvest by training our people how to live on mission in their community or by fostering a culture of disciple making in your church. The district has development tracks for both of these.
Get Involved
We can support church planting efforts by partnering with regional churches that are planting, starting a church planting residency, or having conversations with your leadership about planting another church. Our district team would love to engage with you more about what this could look like.
As a district, God wants to work in us, so that He can work through us to reach the 9.2 million people that call Eastern Pennsylvania home. Let’s pray and labor together to see our state impacted by Jesus.
Next time you travel around the district look around and ask God, “What do you see?”