Category: Of Random Interest

Stateside Versus Global Effectiveness

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.

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…

And The Moral of the Story Is

THE eminent Russian physicist Andrei Linde once found himself on a long flight seated beside a businessman nose-deep in A Brief History of Time.

Without having been introduced and before the usual small talk, they struck up a conversation about it.

What do you think of it? Linde asked.

Fascinating, said the businessman. I cant put it down.

Oh, thats interesting, the scientist replied. I found it quite heavy going in places and didnt fully understand some parts.

At which point the businessman closed the book on his lap, leaned across with a compassionate smile, and said, Let me explain.…

Stories like this keep me from saying everything I think…

source (the above excerpt is actually a conflation of two sources, the first was from Sunday On Scotland, but I can’t find a link that works. Anyway, their opening sentence was much better than the second source I found so I kept it)