After musing about collegians in the AG, I got curious about our district’s demographics and so I emailed Rich Hopping (our secretrary/treasurer) and asked him how many people are in our district and how many we’re reaching.
He said:
It is our estimation there are 16 million people who live in the geographical boundaries of the NCN District. There are 130 thousand people who call an Assemblies of God church their church home. On any Sunday morning there are 80 to 90 thousand folks in attendance.
For the record, our geographical boundaries are the entire state of Nevada and California north of Fresno (but not including Fresno).
That translates to roughly 0.8% of our district. By comparison, we’re reaching less than 0.5% of the collegians in our district. So college ministry lags behind in the Assemblies (although not nearly as badly as I feared).
By the way, I find Assemblies of God triumphalism pretty funny given that we’re reaching less than 1% of our audience (in our district, at least). Worldwide we rock, but in America things are a different story. update: in 2003 America had a population of 290,809,777 and the Assemblies of God reported a constituency of 2,729,562, which works out to 0.9%. So our district is just a tad below the average in terms of constituency as a percentage of the population. My curiousity piqued, I checked our worldwide constituency as a percentage of global population–50,000,000 versus 6,000,000,000 also comes out to 0.8%. We’re nothing if not consistent…
Some other details that interested me in my research:
- Our district had more involved collegians than any other: 2,147 (5.1% of the AG total). At least, we had more as a raw number. We probably trail several other districts when you evaluate involved collegians as a percentage of the population (the Northwest District, for example, has 2,040 students involved but many fewer collegians and colleges in their district than we do, so they’re doing better than us).
- Our pastors estimate that about 41% of the collegians in our churches are involved in campus ministry. 24% in Chi Alpha and 18% in other ministries (like InterVarsity).
Anyway, all that was of tremendous interest to me. I hope it is of at least moderate interest to some of you. 🙂
On an unrelated note–is there anyone else blogging about the Assemblies of God? It is the world’s fourth largest Christian body (with an interesting mix of adherents), but I haven’t stumbled across anyone else commenting on us from the inside. I’ve hit a few other AGers online (such as John Abela, Tim Bednar, and Randy Jumper), but I haven’t really found any dialog about the movement.
Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places. Or maybe we’re all so scared of our leadership that AG bloggers keep as quiet as we can.
Or maybe we’re simply lazy…
Lazy perhaps. I believe we do not think strategically and execute the tactical
plan well enough to be effective.
lazy and scared and ignorant is my take so far Glen
Glenn I think we’re lazy and scared.
I worked at the A/G headquarters in Springfield for seven years, graduated from one of our colleges (before they started calling it a “university”), and got about 20 hours of AGTS under my belt before I left SGF. I’m sorta on the inside. But I didn’t start a blog until a month ago, mostly because I was sure I didn’t have much to say, and also because I moderate an A/G discussion group and am involved in two others. So, I was writing, but just not on the Web.
So, I have a blog now, and I post about the A/G from time to time. Feel free to check it out and leave comments.
As to why the rest of the A/G fellowship doesn’t blog more, I think there are a lot of A/Gers blogging, they’re just not self-identifying, and they’re not writing critically. Most people, in fact, don’t really think critically very much, and when they do, they really don’t want their opinions archived for all-time in Technorati.
Regards,
Rich.
Glen,
I think we can safely say that the Assemblies of God USA is in a major slump. In looking at the 2004 Stats from Springfield, it’s easy to see how this is true. All said, after closer and new ones, the total new church growth for 2004 was something like 20 or 25 churches that opened their doors.
Given that we have major revivals and growth in Brazil and Korea, (the two largest countries for A/G, IIRC), I’m thinking it’s about time for a relocation of the “world-wide headquarters”. (ok, I didn’t really just say that, did I?)
Based upon the 20-odd A/G pastors I speak with on a weekly basis, via my online A/G ministry websites, I have to conclude that we in the USA A/G have simply become stagnant.
We have forgotten why we were formed. We have forgotten about the little churches. We have forgotten about the men and women out there on the front lines, the inner cities, and the places in the middle of nowhere, in our quest to “grow”, that we forgot what kind of growth is health growth.
As for “A/G Bloggers”… I don’t know of too many. R. Tatum has perhaps the largest list I know of at his site. I tend to think that (a) most A/G Pastors don’t care to spend the time keeping blogs, and (b) heaven forbid they say something they might later regret, and © if you stop to think about the average age of A/G pastors… most of them are older.
As Dan Betzer said at the 2005 Lay Leadership Summit,
[quote]“we have had a lot of young men coming into the A/G fellowship with zeal and passion, only to step on the toes of the pastor-down-the-street-who-sits-on-the-district-board, and the next thing the young pastor knows is he is being handed his dismissal papers.”[quote]
When one stops to think about the truth of what he is saying, and the reality of the average-age of A/G Pastors here in the USA, it is only a matter of time before nature takes it’s course and we die a slow death… unless, of course, changes are made. (but that’s a whole other topic)
Blessings,
John B. Abela
The AG in the USA is certainly dying a slow death. Why? Easy.
We are bloated with bureacracy, riddled with religion, and anxious with age! How’s that for preachin’?
But seriously, I have been annoyed for around 15 years about how we desperately need leadership development, otherwise known as discipleship, and yet the AG has the best discipleship community on the planet (I believe) in XA. If the AG ever wants to stop the slide we are in all they need do is tap some of the XA leadership for district roles and let them start injecting strategic discipleship into our ranks.
We should also tap XA guys to be spiritual directors for our colleges — they would start discipling our future leaders.
But, we are not going to do this. The best we can hope for is that some our older guys will get appointed.…when they are in their 70’s. Hey, that would only be a few more years! You can see a cartoon of our problem here: http://www.churchhistory101.com/images/AGHQ.jpg
Hah! I didn’t know you did cartooning. Wow.
I appreciate your church history site, man. I push it to students periodically. Helpful stuff.