A Scenario...That Should Move Us Out...

I was thinking about a church I pastored. In a seven year period we raised $7,500,000 in offerings and special building fund income. Sounds tremendous to most, but to me I am grieved in my heart. I should be grieved I was part of this.

What saddens my heart is this. If this church had 50 converts a year for the last 20 years we could say we reached 1,000 people. (That is a liberal number because we had the largest conversions in that 20 year period with just over 60 a year on a good year, at over 10% of our total attendees.. If the church had 1,000 new converts in 20 years at 50 a year, the cost of making disciples per new convert was $7,500.

But there's more to consider, some of the 50 people won to Christ each year were rededications of people who relocated themselves to our church. But there's more, I only used the financials from 7 of the twenty years - what would happen to our cost per disciple if it included our full 20 years of income? And, in these twenty years we had two major building campaigns.

We see here that we need to make more disciples than we have. It doesn't need to cost that much to make disciples of hungry searching people. Was this Church an unusual phenomena of poor stewardship? I wish she was, but the truth is, she is not alone.

What do we need to do in order to be better stewards? Or are you satisfied with these stats?