Whatever Happened to the Church?

I've been reading a lot lately about mission work and church planting across the world. As I read and study the strategies these missionaries and church planters use to try to establish a connection with their respective communities I began to wonder why the local church is not more effective in doing the same thing.
It seems everyone gets excited and pumped up about going on a short-term mission trip to evangelize an area in Africa or some Indian village in the Southwest, but very few will even take a small amount of time out of their day to come together and devise strategies to do these same things in their own ministry field. I know of many associations and churches that are really pushing establishing new church plants. While I am all in favor of planting churches, in fact, I am in the process of leading our church to plant a church in a surrounding community, it seems to me that we are quick to send our resources to help start a work in a different area, while dragging our feet in our own local churches.
When we think of church plants we think of discovering the community in which the church will be planted, planning carefully how we are going to go about reaching this community and engaging in numerous evangelistic efforts to reach these people. I want to argue that if we would stop what we are doing (or not doing) and seek the heart of God and pray over our present community just maybe God would reignite a passion for the people in our neighborhoods. The church needs to become the church again. We need to develop a strategy to reach the people in our own community, plan and implement evangelistic events to reach the lost in our neighborhoods. Once we become a mission-minded church seeking to reach our local community, then we will be much more effective at planting churches in new areas to reach another segment of people. Whatever happened to the church? We grew stagnant and lazy. Its time for the church to rise up and develop a strategy to reach our neighborhoods.