New Church Movement Exploding with Growth Despite Pandemic from Christian News Journal
A new study from Lifeway Research says church attendance across the US is declining. A Gallup poll released in March says that church closures are projected to double or triple in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. These findings are summarized by an article in Religion News Service entitled “Study: More churches closing than opening.”[1] Yet, despite these grim reports, there is another side to the story. Daniel Kolenda (successor to the renowned evangelist Reinhard Bonnke) believes that there is a golden opportunity presenting itself to the Church. “It’s an opportunity for a reset,” he said. “What if we could use this occasion to return to a more authentic expression of church – preaching the gospel, winning the lost, and discipling the nations.”
Kolenda is not simply theorizing. In the height of the pandemic, he, and the ministry he leads – Christ for all Nations (CfaN) – started planning to launch a brand-new local church expression of their ministry. The new effort is picking up incredible momentum as it heads toward its official August 15th launch date. More than 1,000 people have professed newfound faith in Christ as a result of their outreaches in Orlando over the last few months. Dozens of local small discipleship groups have been launched – often attended by the many new converts. Lakes, ponds, swimming pools, and hot tubs have become baptismal tanks. It has all the energy and momentum of a movement.
Hundreds of ministers from across the US and around the world have relocated to the greater Orlando area to be a part of Nations Church. Many of them originally came to be trained in Christ for all Nations’ mass Evangelism Bootcamp. CfaN has documented more than 80-million conversions through their supermassive outdoor “crusades.” They have seen some of the largest gatherings in human history, with hundreds of thousands regularly packing large fields to hear the gospel preached. Their Evangelism Bootcamp is a strategy to “multiply evangelists for the harvest.”
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But it’s not just the Bootcamp Evangelists that are relocating. Many internationally recognized ministers have come to fill roles in the nascent congregation’s leadership team. On Mother’s Day (May 9, 2021) Daniel Kolenda, announced that Eric Gilmour (Sonship International) would join the pastoral team with plans to bring his popular teaching ministry to the Church. On May 23, Kolenda again brought exciting news to the young congregation: Scott McNamara (Author of Jesus at the Door) will join the team to lead the Church’s Evangelism department. McNamara joins a “dream team” of highly influential and nationally recognized evangelists, like Levi Lutz, Joe Oden, and Jerri Hill, wife of the famed Brownsville Revival Evangelist Steve Hill (1954 – 2014), that are also on the leadership team.
