Church Priorities

found via Wesley Blog:
A new Barna study talks about the priorities of different churches - mainline, baptist, evangelical, etc. - I thought the statistics were pretty interesting. Most interesting? Differences in priorities between predominately white and predominately black churches.

An excerpt: "Compared to white pastors, few black pastors identified worship and preaching as top priorities, in spite of the fact that our surveys among church-goers show that African-Americans are much more likely than white congregants to be satisfied with their worship experience." I think that's pretty cool.

Also, mainline denominations ranked discipleship as highest priority, over evangelism, which was ranked highest by Southern Baptist churches for instance. Interesting - I guess it is a chicken-egg question to an extent, isn't it? Can you reach out, if the people reaching out are not disciples? How can you make disciples, if you haven't reached out?