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…