America needs more churches?

from Ed Stetzer's Planting Missional Churches

In 1900, there were 28 churches for every 10,000 Americans.
In 1950, there were 17 churches for every 10,000 Americans.
In 2000, there were 12 churches for every 10,000 Americans.
In 2004, there were 11 churches for every 10,000 Americans.

In 1900, the Census Bureau counted 212,000 churches. In 2000, the number of churches that existed in the United States was 349,506. In other words, the number of churches increased just over 50% while the population of the country has almost quadrupled.

Another interesting stat?

Today, one in ten Americans was born in another country.

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So what does this tell us about the need for planting new, gospel-centered churches? How does this inform our thinking? How does the fact that 1 out of every 10 Americans is actually foreign born change our ideas of what these new churches should look like?

Too often we are lulled into thinking that, because we live in North America, we are a "churched" nation. These statistics by the Director of Research for the North American Mission Board with the Southern Baptist Convention seem to point us to a different conclusion. We desperately need an explosion of churches across North America.