Category: Of Random Interest

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 can’t put it down.”

“Oh, that’s inter­est­ing,” the sci­en­tist replied. “I found it quite heavy going in places and didn’t 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)

College Folk and The Assemblies of God

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).

You Know You’re From Louisiana

I got one of those for­wards from a friend (Brandt Noel) this morn­ing. He nev­er for­wards me stuff, so I decid­ed to take a look at it. I liked it!

In abridged ver­sion, here’s a Louisiana primer:

  1. There are 5,000 types of snakes, and 4,998 live in Louisiana.
  2. Squir­rels will eat any­thing. And folks in Louisiana will eat squir­rel.
  3. If it grows, it sticks; if it crawls, it bites.
  4. It is not a shop­ping cart, it is a bug­gy.
  5. “Fix­in­to” is one word.
  6. There ain’t no such thing as “lunch.” There’s “din­ner” and then
    there’s “sup­per.”!
  7. Sweet tea is appro­pri­ate for all meals, and you start drink­ing it when you’re two.
  8. “Jeet?” is actu­al­ly a phrase mean­ing “Did you eat?”

And you know you’re from LA (Louisiana, that is) if:

  1. You mea­sure dis­tance in min­utes.
  2. You use “fix” as a verb. Exam­ple: I am fix­ing to go to the store.
  3. You “axe” peo­ple ques­tions. Exam­ple: I got some­thin’ to axe you ’bout.
  4. You only own four spices: salt, Tony’s, Tabas­co and ketchup.
  5. The local papers cov­er nation­al and inter­na­tion­al news on one page
    and six pages for local gos­sip and sports.
  6. You think that the first day deer sea­son is a nation­al hol­i­day.
  7. You find 100 degrees Fahren­heit “a lit­tle warm.”
  8. You know all four sea­sons: almost sum­mer, sum­mer, still sum­mer,
    and Christ­mas.
  9. You describe the first cool snap (below 70 degrees) as good gum­bo weath­er.
  10. A car­bon­at­ed soft drink isn’t a soda, cola, or pop…it’s a Coke, regard­less of brand or fla­vor. Exam­ple: “What kin­na coke you want?”
  11. Fried Cat­fish is the oth­er white meat.
  12. You laugh out loud when you vis­it friends from oth­er states and they com­plain about the humid­i­ty.

He Wrote What?

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?”

Lust After William and Mary’s Commencement Speaker

William and Mary had an off-the charts com­mence­ment speak­er. Not to dump on a Supreme Court Jus­tice, but I have to say Stan­ford lost out by com­par­i­son.

Need Help Procrastinating?

Finals are near­ly upon us. On the oth­er hand, it’s a hol­i­day week­end. Go ahead, take the geek test and kill some time…