Church Math
I love math. I know it’s hated by so many people but for me it brings about a sense of reason and logic into almost every area of my life. One place you wouldn’t think of math being important is church. However, church math is my favorite. Here are my five favorite church math facts:
1. All it would take for our church to regularly worship over 700 people is for every person who currently goes to our church to bring one friend. (Everyone bringing one friend is a lot easier than Pastor David bringing over 300 friends.)
2. If everyone who went to our church gave up one cup of coffee a week and gave that money to the church, we would have an $100,000 to do ministry. That equals feeding 400 kids a year through the backpack program or doubling the amount that goes to our children, youth, and worship ministries each year.
3. If you go to church every week but don’t go to a small group or do anything else to deepen your faith, you’ll spend 52 hours a year at church. That’s less time than you’ll spend on the toilet and it’s less time than you have from the time you leave work on Friday until you go back to work on Monday. Joining a small group is the easiest way to double the amount of time you spend in spiritual development and will get you connected to other Christians to walk along side you.
4. If you used the audio version of the Bible, you could listen to the entire Bible in about 70 hours. That means 12 minutes a day lets you read it all within a year.
5. 85% of Americans become Christians between the ages of 4 and 14. If we want to have the greatest impact on our mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world, it is going to start with kids and youth ministry.
Why do all of these numbers matter? Well, first of all, if I were to say our goal in the next three years is to worship 700 each Sunday and to bring in an additional quarter million dollars for ministry, it sounds impossible. But when you realize that all that takes is each one of us bringing one friend to church and giving up a cup of coffee a week it suddenly sounds much more doable. None of this is asking you to change the world or do something radical. It’s asking you to do simple things that add up to monumental changes.