The Assemblies of God in Nor Cal and Nev

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…