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…

Superfun Party

Yes­ter­day was cool. We had our on-cam­pus sum­mer Bible study and then we decid­ed to have a par­ty to wel­come Andrew back to Amer­i­ca after his jour­ney abroad.

We fig­ured few things are more Amer­i­can than BBQ, so we had a BBQ par­ty (after which most folk left) and then the guys who remained played XBox with me until mid­night.

I love my job.

Inci­den­tal­ly, one of the XBox games that we played is called Blood Wake, a birth­day gift from my younger broth­er.

I men­tion that because the plot of the game is a younger broth­er try­ing to slay his evil old­er broth­er.

Thanks, Greg. 🙂

Simulation Argument

Many of you have seen this before, but Hec­tor just for­ward­ed me a link to Are You Liv­ing In A Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion? is a site that argues that at least one of the fol­low­ing is true:

(1) The chances that a species at our cur­rent lev­el of devel­op­ment can avoid going extinct before becom­ing tech­no­log­i­cal­ly mature is neg­li­gi­bly small

(2) Almost no tech­no­log­i­cal­ly mature civil­i­sa­tions are inter­est­ed in run­ning com­put­er sim­u­la­tions of minds like ours

(3) You are almost cer­tain­ly an artif­i­cal enti­ty in a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion.

The author leaves off option 4 (or rather, dis­miss­es it in his set­up).

(4) It is not pos­si­ble to run a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion of a mind like ours.

Any­way, it struck me as a Chris­t­ian that my response is that num­bers 1 and 2 (and pos­si­bly num­ber 4) are true. The world will end via divine inter­ven­tion before our civ­i­liza­tion is capa­ble of such a feat (and once in heav­en we will pre­sum­ably have no inter­est in run­ning such sim­u­la­tions even if they prove tech­no­log­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble).

Fun­ny how Chris­tian­i­ty affects your repons­es to everything–even bizarre aca­d­e­m­ic papers. 🙂

Mission Accomplished!

I final­ly whit­tled my inbox down to where all my mes­sages are vis­i­ble on one screen. Par­don me while I throw a lit­tle par­ty…

Reaching Leaders

I was blown away by this arti­cle from The Ori­gins Project newslet­ter (Emerg­ing Lead­ers part 1). I believe it was writ­ten by Alex McManus, but I’m not alto­geth­er cer­tain of that.

Alexan­der Hamil­ton was 19 years old when George Wash­ing­ton appoint­ed him as an aid. Impres­sive enough, except when com­pared to the fact that at 14, Hamil­ton set the rules for the sea-far­ing cap­tains who trad­ed with his employ­ers on St. Croix Island.

In 1381, Richard II walked onto a field and faced off against Wat Tyler and his mob. Lat­er that same day, after four­teen year old Richard 11 had Wat Tyler behead­ed, the young king addressed the mob of peas­ants with enough sen­si­bil­i­ty to calm and end Wat Tyler’s Peas­ant Rebel­lion.

Few of us are aware of the way his­to­ry and cul­ture ‑not to men­tion our per­son­al age — influ­ence our feel­ings about youth­ful­ness and lead­er­ship. In order to cre­ate an ethos con­ducive to includ­ing emerg­ing lead­ers, we’ll need to ask our­selves the ques­tion, “At what age does some­one have capac­i­ty to lead?”

Recent­ly I spoke on a Uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus and was star­tled at the youth­ful­ness of the stu­dent body. This hap­pens to me every year. In truth, the stu­dents are the same age under­grad­u­ates have always been. I’m just one year old­er. Every year, as our church lead­ers age, the young look younger. The cor­re­spond­ing dan­ger is that we may over­look many of our ablest lead­ers.

His­to­ry is sprin­kled with tales of the exploits, achieve­ments and lead­er­ship of young adults, even teenagers. Colum­bus and all the explor­ers of the new world relied on hard work­ing teens to man their crews. Think about this: Mid­dle school age chil­dren set­ting off on adven­tures that many adults would lack the courage to under­take. In times past, teenagers could lead armies in bat­tle and young pages could be made knights as ear­ly as age 12.

Con­trast this to the head dea­con who said of his new “young” pas­tor, “We’re let­ting him stretch his wings a lit­tle.” Many emerg­ing lead­ers won’t stretch their wings with­in a cage of past accom­plish­ments and exist­ing insti­tu­tions. Emerg­ing lead­er­ship will go where it can fly. One ques­tion we must ask our­selves is, do we real­ly want young lead­ers? Or are we only look­ing for some­one to serve in and man­age a pro­gram we’ve cre­at­ed.

A tip of the hat to Jor­dan Coop­er for find­ing this.

I keep describ­ing the stu­dents at Stan­ford as “future lead­ers.” I ought to know bet­ter, but I some­times nail them into a box that I ought to be rip­ping apart on their behalf.

I will say one thing though–while some stu­dents are ready to lead some­thing major from the moment they set foot on cam­pus, oth­ers aren’t ready even years after grad­u­a­tion (this isn’t just at Stan­ford, this is every­where I’ve been). I guess a huge part of my job ought to be fig­ur­ing out which ten­den­cy a giv­en stu­dent has…

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)

Stanford Goes Open-Source With Sakai

I thought this was kind of cool: Stan­ford is one of the four key uni­ver­si­ties spon­sor­ing a new open source course man­age­ment sys­tem (the oth­er three are MIT, Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, and Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty). The new project is called Sakai and Stan­ford’s ver­sion will go live on cam­pus in 2005.