Category: Assemblies of God

Rich Tatum, the BlogRo­dent, has cre­at­ed a list of Pen­te­costal blog­gers he finds inter­est­ing.

Any­way, I made the list.

Thanks to Earl Creps for the heads up (and thanks to Rich for the link).

I just learned that friend and fel­low Assem­bly of God min­is­ter Char Blair has set up a blog. She has a min­istry to young peo­ple con­fused about their sex­u­al iden­ti­ty. You go, girl!

One of our alum­ni, Eliz­a­beth, emailed me this fas­ci­nat­ing NYT arti­cle: On a Chris­t­ian Mis­sion to the Top. It’s an arti­cle about min­istry at the Ivy League schools focus­ing on a group called Chris­t­ian Union

. There’s a relat­ed NPR sto­ry.

I real­ly appre­ci­ate their vision. I’ve often thought that some­one ought to estab­lish evan­gel­i­cal min­istry cen­ters at the top tier uni­ver­si­ties, so I’m glad to see that they’re run­ning with it.

Any­way, this para­graph leapt out at me:

By the 1970’s, Assem­blies church­es were sprout­ing up in afflu­ent sub­urbs across the coun­try. Recent sur­veys by Mar­garet Polo­ma, a his­to­ri­an at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Akron in Ohio, found Assem­blies mem­bers more edu­cat­ed and bet­ter off than the gen­er­al pub­lic.

I’m speech­less.

The Assem­blies of God and edu­ca­tion are not two con­cepts that are often linked in the minds of the pop­u­lace at large (with rea­son, I might add: I’ve actu­al­ly heard these words uttered at a min­is­te­r­i­al gath­er­ing with absolute­ly no hint of humor, “The prob­lem with the Assem­blies is all this eddikashun.” More­over, I saw sev­er­al heads nod in agree­ment). Per­haps that instance has unfair­ly taint­ed my per­cep­tions of the move­ment as a whole, but I’ve nev­er been par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed with our intel­lec­tu­al prowess in the Assem­blies.

On the flip side, one of our AG min­is­ters in San Fran­cis­co is a Har­vard grad who lives in a bus and min­is­ters to the home­less. And of my three dis­trict offi­cials (bish­op-equiv­a­lents) one has his doc­tor­ate and anoth­er just needs to fin­ish his dis­ser­ta­tion. A pas­tor I know in the San Joaquin val­ley was once nom­i­nat­ed for a Pulitzer. Come to think of it, I know lots of sharp, well-edu­cat­ed min­is­ters and even more sharp, well-edu­cat­ed laypeo­ple.

I just always assumed they were a minor­i­ty. I should real­ly rethink that.

Gene Scott died yes­ter­day, and I feel oblig­ed to say some­thing for some strange rea­son. I guess it’s because I’m always struck by the vague­ly over­lap­ping areas of our lives.

First, he was at one time an Assem­blies of God min­is­ter in my dis­trict. He left the denom­i­na­tion years back (in good stand­ing, sur­pris­ing­ly enough), but the con­nec­tion is still there.

Sec­ond, Dr. Scott had a con­nec­tion with Stan­ford University–he earned his doc­tor­ate here in 1957 and was appar­ent­ly once pro­filed for the cov­er sto­ry of the Stan­ford alum­ni mag­a­zine (this seems to be an undig­i­tized issue or else I would link to it).

Third, his min­istry was by its nature a mon­ey-ask­ing sort. His meth­ods were way over the line (some allege immoral and ille­gal), although he was pret­ty fun­ny about it: “I some­times get asked about what hap­pens to all the mon­ey that comes in to this min­istry. Let me tell you what hap­pens to it. I spend it!”

Fourth, he was eccen­tric. That’s putting it mild­ly. If you’ve seen his show you know what I mean, and if you haven’t there’s no way you would believe me–for instance, one of his pecu­liar wor­ship songs was Kill a Pis­sant for Jesus (I do not, sad­ly, have the lyrics). While I applaud the use of the under­uti­lized word pis­sant , the song gives me pause. If you’ve got a few min­utes, read over this old arti­cle from the LA Times: The Shock Jock of Tele­vi­sion to get a feel for his unique min­istry style.

The Assem­blies of God, Stan­ford, fundrais­ing, and eccen­tric­i­ty. That’s real­ly all we had in com­mon as far as I can deter­mine (that, and we were both Cal­i­for­nia white males). In some ways I admire him tremen­dous­ly, and in oth­er ways I shud­der when I think of him. Either way, I con­sid­er him a dis­tant cousin in min­istry.

I hope he’s in heav­en. If so, I imag­ine there are a lot of sur­prised peo­ple hav­ing some very unusu­al con­ver­sa­tions with him.

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.

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…

This from the head of Chi Alpha: Accord­ing to the 2003 ACMR Report AG church­es report there are 245,912 adher­ents that are 18–24 years old that attend our church. This rep­re­sents 9% of all AG adher­ents.

By way of com­par­i­son, 18–24 year olds com­prise 14% of the Cal­i­for­nia state pop­u­la­tion (I was unable to quick­ly find the equiv­a­lent nation­al sta­tis­tic).

Antho­ny Sco­ma just told me about a book/author col­li­sion so improb­a­ble that I had to check it out for myself: Pen­te­costal Gifts and Min­istries in a Post­mod­ern Era by James K. Bridges.

Antho­ny assures me that con­trib­u­tors include Mau­rice Led­nicky and Opal Red­din.
Con­tin­ue read­ing “He Wrote What?”