Stateside Versus Global Effectiveness

I emailed my obser­va­tions about the Assem­blies of God reach­ing just under 1% every­where to a few of my friends.

Earl Creps weighed in with this com­ment:

I just did some research for an AGWM pre­sen­ta­tion and found reports that about 40% of all Pen­te­costals (not just AG) live in Latin Amer­i­ca (with a lot of those in Brazil), com­pris­ing about 10% of the area’s 500 mil­lion inhab­i­tants. You’re right about the gross sta­tis­tics con­ceal­ing huge dis­par­i­ties, with the con­se­quent dan­ger of an “aver­age” real­i­ty. We are def­i­nite­ly much more “suc­cess­ful” abroad, but only when cer­tain select­ed head-to-head com­par­isons (e.g., New York vs. Malawi) are used. When oth­er com­par­isons are in view (e.g. Arkansas vs. Swe­den), well, things just a look a lit­tle dif­fer­ent.

Steve Mills not­ed that my stats might be flawed

For exam­ple, here in the NW we have a pop­u­la­tion of 6,131,445 and total adher­hents of 118,662 mak­ing 1.9 per­cent of the dis­trict. Even if you add in 2 mil­lion peo­ple for North ID which is also in our dis­trict the num­ber is still 1.4 per­cent.

First, bra­vo to the North­west Dis­trict. I’ve long thought they were among our most effec­tive dis­tricts in terms of coach­ing and flex­i­bil­i­ty. Now I know that my sub­jec­tive impres­sion is val­i­dat­ed by the facts.

Sec­ond, this is the sort of thing I’d expect. We have hot spots and cold spots in Amer­i­ca just as we do world­wide. They’re prob­a­bly bal­anc­ing out places like the north­east where we’re strug­gling much more.