We reach the whole world by way of our own backyard, but right now, that backyard is going quiet. In the Season 2 premiere of The Harvest Report, Austin Reed opens with encouragement from the field: two now-indigenous, self-funded church plants in a restricted country known for its pyramids, new planters funded through Global Church Planting Day in Nigeria, Mexico, and India, and a milestone of 94 concurrent church plants across 11 countries with Brazil newly added and the 1,000-church goal in sight. Then he turns to the burden that has gripped his heart for the last six months: the quiet collapse of church planting here in the United States. Because Global Baptist Church Planters' international model doesn't translate cleanly at home (fully funding a planter can cost $550 a month overseas and $6,000–$7,000 a month here), the ministry got creative. Over the past few months, GBCP set out to interview church planters from the last two decades and build something that didn't exist: a real data set on domestic church planting. What it turned up is sobering: -Non-Calvinistic, independent Baptist churches now number closer to 9,000–10,000, not the 15,000 long assumed, and are declining roughly 3% a year, about 250–300 churches quietly closing with nothing planted to replace them. -2,900 towns over 10,000 people, 70 cities over 100,000, and 900+ entire counties with no qualifying church at all. -Of the ten largest churches of this kind from the early '90s, only three still exist in any form. -Mexico and the Philippines now send out more Baptist missionaries each year than the United States. From there, Austin walks through the cautionary tale of the Methodist movement (once the greatest church-planting force in America) and the three fatal moves that hollowed it out. Then he shows those same three moves quietly repeating inside the independent Baptist world today. This isn't a doom-and-gloom message. It's a call to action and it lands on one specific, doable step every listener can take this week. Heads up: this premiere is a solo message rather than the usual sit-down. The rest of Season 2 returns to the interview format you know, including a conversation recorded in New Zealand with one of the best-known church-planting pastors there. The ask: Look at the towns within a 35–40 minute drive of you. Find one with no gospel-preaching, non-Calvinistic Baptist church, and begin to pray, daily, and by name, that God would call a laborer to that place and show you your part in getting one planted. "Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth labourers into his harvest." Know a church planter or feel the tug yourself? Reach out to Austin at austinreed@globalbaptist.net.
