Month: February 2009

We're Number 10

Just noticed that the Nation­al Coun­cil of Church’s 2009 Year­book was recent­ly pub­lished (found via MMI). Here are the stats on the 10 largest reli­gious groups in Amer­i­ca.

  1. The Roman Catholic Church, 67,117,06 mem­bers, down 0.59 per­cent.
  2. The South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, 16,266,920 mem­bers, down 0.24 per­cent.
  3. The Unit­ed Methodist Church, 7,931,733 mem­bers, down 0.80 per­cent.
  4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, 5,873,408 mem­bers, up 1.63 per­cent.
  5. The Church of God in Christ, 5,499,875 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  6. Nation­al Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, U.S.A., Inc., 5,000,000 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  7. Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church in Amer­i­ca, 4,709,956 mem­bers, down 1.35 per­cent.
  8. Nation­al Bap­tist Con­ven­tion of Amer­i­ca, Inc., 3,500,000 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
  9. Pres­by­ter­ian Church (USA), 2,941,412 mem­bers, down 2.79 per­cent
  10. Assem­blies of God, 2,863,265 mem­bers, up 0.96 per­cent. dan­ger­ous beau­ty divx online blue­toes the christ­mas elf movie down­load down­load home­ward bound ii lost in san fran­cis­co online

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So.… yeah. We’re num­ber 10, we’re num­ber 10, we’re num­ber 10! Maybe we can chant that at Gen­er­al Coun­cil.

Sad­ly, we’re the only Chris­t­ian group (in the top 10) that is grow­ing. And even sad­der, when you get into our inter­nal num­bers you real­ize that a few parts of our move­ment are grow­ing rapid­ly but that there are huge swaths under­go­ing slow decline. For now, the explo­sive growth is off­set­ting the decay.

I’m grate­ful that I’m on a win­ning team and that our move­ment is grow­ing when so many are stag­nat­ing, but I must con­fess that a 0.96% growth rate is not exact­ly the sort of thing that stirs the pulse.

We need divine­ly-sparked revival to which we must respond with orga­ni­za­tion­al renew­al, or else we’ll soon be cel­e­brat­ing the fact that we shrunk least.

But hey — for now I’ve got a handy fact I can share with peo­ple who say, “The Assem­blies of God? Nev­er heard of it.” I can now shoot back, “Hey — we’re almost as large as the Pres­by­te­ri­ans. Near­ly. We’re only off by like 80,000 peo­ple. That’s the size of a good South Amer­i­can church. We haven’t quite fig­ured out how to do that in North Amer­i­ca, but it can’t be that hard. So we’re basi­cal­ly one mis­si­o­log­i­cal insight and then one good church plant away from being num­ber 9. So there.”

Baptism on Campus

Jan­u­ary 29th I had a great priv­i­lege. I was able to bap­tize my friend Kel­ly in the Claw Foun­tain in between the Book­store and Old Union.

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The water was cold. In fact, I saw Kel­ly’s eyes shoot open when she went under the water and I could prac­ti­cal­ly read the thoughts run­ning through her brain, “I want to gasp. But if I gasp, I’ll drown. Drown­ing is bad at a bap­tism. But I want to gasp so bad­ly.”

For­tu­nate­ly, the warm Cal­i­for­nia sun brought her back from the brink of hypother­mia right after I pulled her up. I’m just glad I told her to bring a change of clothes and a tow­el!

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watch slaugh­ter online If hav­ing a bap­tism out in pub­lic strikes you as a lit­tle odd I’d like to point out that it has ample Bib­li­cal and his­tor­i­cal prece­dent. The most famous Bib­li­cal exam­ple is from Acts 8:36–38:

As they trav­eled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. Why should­n’t I be bap­tized?” And he gave orders to stop the char­i­ot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip bap­tized him.

Yeah. So we did that.

And I hope we get to do it again soon. 🙂

Digital Discipleship

In one of the first con­ver­sa­tions I remem­ber hav­ing with Scott Aught­mon, he tried to sell me on the advan­tages of using sequen­tial autore­spon­ders down­load evil under the sun

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in min­istry. I had no idea what he was talk­ing about, so I smiled and nod­ded.

Turns out they’re awe­some. I wish I had lis­tened to him soon­er.

Con­sid­er the case of Dick Schroed­er. He speaks at retreats and fre­quent­ly prays with peo­ple to be bap­tized in the Holy Spir­it. Over the years, he has put togeth­er a series of emails that he sends to peo­ple after­wards to coach them from a dis­tance.

One day he asked me if there was a way to auto­mate the process. My mind flashed back to Scot­t’s enthu­si­asm for these autore­spon­der things, so I down­loaded a free PHP script called Infi­nite Respon­der

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and set up http://chialpha.com/resources/holyspirit.

Now if some­one signs up, they begin receiv­ing coach­ing emails from Dick once a week. Since the mes­sages appear to come from his email address, stu­dents can just hit “reply” and ask Dick about any­thing they found con­fus­ing or that they need spe­cial advice about. It’s very low-main­te­nance for him, and Chi Alpha stu­dents nation­wide get a year’s worth of Dick­’s exper­tise.

Since rolling this out at the World Mis­sions Sum­mit (Jan 1st), we’ve had just over 200 peo­ple sub­scribe to these updates. That works out to about 7 signups a day. I have no idea where the total will cap out, but momen­tum is build­ing and I don’t even feel that the resource has been thor­ough­ly pub­li­cized yet.

Things I like about the tool:

  • Low-tech. geron­i­mo down­load

    It’s just email. No one has to install a spe­cial plu­g­in, put head­phones in their com­put­er, or have some insane­ly fast con­nec­tion.

  • Per­son­al. The emails come from an actu­al human being to whom you can respond.
  • Low-main­te­nance. Once the email is in the data­base, it’s just there. Nei­ther Dick nor I need to do any­thing spe­cial to send them out. And Dick only gets replies from peo­ple who have spe­cif­ic ques­tions, which is only a frac­tion of the peo­ple who receive any giv­en email.

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Pret­ty cool, eh?

Late­ly I’ve been won­der­ing what oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties are out there. Some ideas that I’ve had:

  • Emails for new believ­ers
  • A “40 days” type cam­paign for Chi Alpha with dai­ly emails where each cam­pus that choos­es to par­tic­i­pate picks its own start and stop times and the script takes care of all those details.
  • A first two weeks of school devo­tion­al to get stu­dents fired up when they return from sum­mer break
  • Coach­ing emails for peo­ple who are called to min­istry
  • Month­ly emails for Chi Alpha grads to help them make the tran­si­tion out of col­lege grace­ful­ly
  • A ter­m’s worth of week­ly emails for peo­ple pio­neer­ing new Chi Alpha min­istries
  • etc,etc

It’s just a mat­ter of find­ing a per­son with the right exper­tise and hook­ing them up. So if you’ve got an idea, I’d love to hear about it. I’d espe­cial­ly love to hear if you’re a Chi Alpha leader who has con­tent ready to go. I can just run it past Den­nis and get that stuff online faster than you can imag­ine. 😉