Tom Allen

I recently read a report from the Barna Research Institute that totally caught me off guard and blew me away. They predict that  1 out of every 5 churches in America will close permanently over the next 18 months.   There are more than 300,000 Evangelical churches in the U.S. That means that over the next year and a half,  60,000 churches will close their doors and disappear.  That's the most frightening thing I have read throughout this entire pandemic.  So, the obvious question is  WHY?  Well, the answer isn't a simple one, as several components have collided to create this dire prediction. Some of those are... FINANCES.  It's evident that it takes money to run a church and that money comes from the tithes and offerings of its members. Even before the pandemic hit, some churches were struggling financially. With the advent of COVID-19, those struggles have only multiplied. Some churches had no way to receive funding except through in-person, manual giving. With the buildi

I don't think there's any argument that we live in unprecedented times. Never in my life has anything drawn our nation to a total standstill quite like this. There has never been a time when we honestly have had no idea what will happen tomorrow. We haven't ever been so aware of everything we have taken for granted. Our "normal" has had the rug pulled out from underneath it.  Nothing is normal. Nothing is the same. No one knows where this will take us, how long it will take us to get there or what it will look like. We're not just dealing with something new...we're dealing with something we don't understand, we don't know how to eradicate it, and we absolutely cannot agree on how we should move forward. I've grown weary, as I'm sure you have as well, of this Novel COVID-19 virus. If I am honest, I've grown much more intolerant of the whining, griping, moaning, and ranting over the whole "To mask or not to mask" deba