Winning or Losing a City (pt. 6): Fancy Statistics
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last post I said the main game in breaking the cycle/beginning to win a city is getting faithful men to man pulpits. But where from??
My friend Eric Love is a maths/computer ninja. He’s done some great stuff with church stats for Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne and it’s well worth looking at. There are even multi-colour maps showing distributions of Christians /bible belts in each city!
His interest is more toward what factors contribute to distribution of Christians over a city… What I notice though is that there are patches of Christians. Sure, lots of those stats are a kind of false positive in that they’ll be attending churches which are liberal/heterodox. But still, there are patches of Christians. It’s not a matter of starting from scratch.
In this scenario (where there are a few Christians already) a key tactic for Paul in the first century was this:
…entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others. (2 Timothy 2.2)
Paul knew that in any group of Christians God would give some to be pastors and teachers (Ephesians 3:11-12) so he urge people like Timothy (above) to seek them out.
Beyond praying then, there needs to be a concerted effort toward ‘entrusting to reliable men’. I’m convinced that church leaders should primarily be the ones doing this since they are best placed to see:
- Who is reliable… concerned with faithfulness, holiness, God’s glory…
- Who God uses to teach people
- Who God uses to make people Christians
- Who pursues bible reading and praying with Christians and non-Christians.
- Who would be willing, or might become willing with some help and encouragment
That’s normally how people come to be ministers – by others noticing their reliability and actively seeking to entrust the faith to them as potential future teachers.
So winning a City like Adelaide needs faithful harvesters who see the need and have their sights set on ‘entrusting to reliable men’.
That is how to turn a patch into a paddock… or a bible belt into a bible blob. It’s pretty key to winning a city.
Some ministers already think this way but not enough…which is where para-church organisations like Scripture Union and Uni groups like ES have a temporary or adjunct role to play. But we’ll come to that in a later post…
What I also notice in Eric’s stats is how many patches there are of people who do not worship Jesus and give him glory. In addition to praying and entrusting then I add one more thing: desiring Jesus’ glory. So that the more I come to know his worth and all he deserves… the more I will be dissatisfied with him having anything less. In myself and my neighbours and my city. He deserves to be worshiped by everyone.
Thanks for the plug Reuben!
As well as the false positives that the census-based maps provide, they also obscure the regions where the Anglican church is strong. Ku-ring-gai I might be about the biggest example. Biggest case in Adelaide for that might be Burnside-NE with St Matts nearby.
Which is why I use plenty of data sources other than the census, but the census is easiest to make fancy maps from!
In the next month I hope to use Mappage to make those maps even fancier, and reinstate the map showing locations of large churches, and add anything else requested by anyone here! (This week I’m crunching some numbers for my old cell group leader who works for Churches of Christ in SA).
Reply to EricLook forward to seeing any updates you make, Eric!
Off the top of your head, can you think of any way to work out which churches our current ministers came from? or maybe to narrow it a bit… Which churches students at bible colleges come from? are those kind of numbers out there?
What i’m thinking is that churches with an above average number of ministers coming out of them are the ones who would potentially be driving the kind of change i’m talking about.
Reply to reubenSome colleges might have in their records the churches that their students are part of – one could look through the list and see where they are.
St Marys BC anecdotally is a small church that has produced a lot of ministers.
Those keen to serve in leadership may well migrate around in their formative years according to where they see needs. Holy Trinity is one place where a lot of ministry apprentices serve, most having grown up in different churches. I don’t know that there’s any particular church that can boast of having raised lots of good Christian leaders from infancy, but Adelaide Uni ES has a good record of sending a lot of students to bible college.
Reply to EricReubs, where do you see the mainline church fitting in? I guess that this is where most churches in Adelaide are at: not simply liberal, not evangelical, but broadly orthodox (even if they don’t always sound like it or look like it, because they don’t necessarily have the Bible teaching or evangelistic emphases of evangelicalism).
Adelaide of course has a thriving Christian college in Tabor. Even if Tabor isn’t solely dedicated to raising up church leaders (I gather it’s trying to become a Christian uni), it’s a local centre for ministry training. Other large independent churches (eg Coastlands, Paradise) run their own training programs (Coastlands offers theological training through a correspondence course in South Africa). Where might these kinds of existing efforts fit in?
Reply to ArthurHey Arthur,
I guess I need to say it then
– i’m only using ‘orthodox’ to avoid unnecessary offence, but since you’ve asked the question…When it comes down to it you can’t win a city with ‘not simply liberal, not evangelical, but broadly orthodox’ churches!
I’m really very interested in encouraging a movement toward reformed, conservative (theologically – not necessarily culturally) Christianity in Adelaide in a big way. Hardly any churches are that and hardly any bible colleges are interested in that. (as far as I can tell)
Maybe those existing efforts will play their part… but I have something bigger and more comprehensive in mind.
The ideal I have in mind (which i’ll elaborate on in the next post) is to have churches of a certain ‘brand’ operating in every part of Adelaide professing, teaching and living reformed conservative Christianity. Because i think that has the best potential to actually win a city, not just pockets but the whole thing…
By brand i mean an identifier that all these churches have in common to show who they are and what they’re on about. In practice it might turn out that an existing denomination becomes the ‘brand’ that does this kind of Christianity…like the Anglicans ‘brand’ in Sydney… or a few existing denominations might head that way. Or perhaps churches from all sorts of denominations buy in to a new common brand, some banner like-minded churches can unite under, because they want in on this city-wide scheme.
What do you reckon? I know it sounds out of the realms of possibility. But I’m happy to talk hypotheticals here… I’d like to know though – does it sound vaguely ‘right’ or ‘useful’? others feel free to comment too of course…
Reply to reubenhttp://home.exetel.com.au/eric5014/mappage/map.htm?xml=stdi,geomiss&goto=5000&z=12
I’ve set up Mappage to show some of those stats! More later.
Reply to Eric@Reuben
Do you have any thoughts yet about what “winning the city” looks like in numbers and timeframe? I guess that will really mark out the work that needs to be done between churches. Over here, Mark has been talking in terms of multiplying the CCH brand to help get 5% of Melbourne into revitalising churches in the next 30 years.
Btw, we went to an MTS seminar on preaching through Zechariah today (with Barry Webb). It was cool to see some more of where Zion in Revelation comes from. I was also reminded of being “the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden” (Mt 5:14). Makes me think of the nations even now beginning to stream up towards Zion as the church burns bright. Pretty exciting!
Reply to Arthur@Eric: cool. looks good. like the big church overlay map – interesting how there’s only one or two per denomination…
@Arthur: That Barry web seminar sounds great – he’s a legend OT preacher!
Marks plans sound great and very exciting. I’m actually more interested in spread since ‘the city’ is the scope. I’d love to see a reformed conservative church, i.e. a church that is part of the brand, in every area in Adelaide. This will come up in my next post, but the thing i most like about Syd Anglicanism is not the size of it, but the spread and consistency. Although some areas are less well reached there’s a church in most parts of the city and you can recommend them to anyone with a high degree of confidence. You can run city-wide evangelistic campaigns from the denominational level and be happy about whichever Anglican church someone turns up at as a result of the campaign.
If anything i’m aiming for a number of churches. Jesus is alive and saving people so he’ll fill them. I looked at the number of parishes in the adelaide diocese as a guide (since these are pretty geographical) and there’s around 84. So one of the points on my 10 year plan is to be personally involved in seeing 84 suitable, willing men give themselves to full time parish ministry. that should just about do it.
30 years is about what I hope for although I imagine it will take more than 1 generation. But who knows what God might bring about?
Reply to reubenI guess I have a broader view of the churches God uses. One friend (in an evanglican ch) was telling me last night that he was led to faith partly through a Catholic Christian friend, on Wednesday I met a woman who became a Christian thru some Moore College students who’s now in a liberal uniting ch. Someone at mens convention was led to Jesus by a church where “you could only use one version of the bible, and no prizes for guessing which one”. Big growth at Paradise overflowed into Rostrevor BC in the 90s, resulting in an overflow to Glen Osmond in 2000.
So for me, “winning a city” is about seeing people in that city turning to Jesus, and the whole body of Christ working to make disciples in every group of people in the city. I think there are sections of the church that are off-track (needing more biblical leadership as you say) but I don’t see the majority of God’s work as happening in a small minority of the churches. I fact I think a variety of churches are necessary!
Still, the more churches there are of the sort you envision, the better! When I put the Syd Ang churches into Mappage I was very impressed with how well they covered Sydney.
A brand of churches… this has been tried before (in a different sector of the Church). Early this decade there was an association set up called Australian Christian Churches…
“Australian Christian Churches is an alliance of contemporary churches committed to communicating Christianity within Australian society through vibrant church services, relevant preaching, and practical community care.”
ACC were hoping to be a big enough collective that they could be seen as almost representative of the Church as a whole, and the media would look to them for official church opinions rather than bishops or moderators in older denoms. ACC was generally organised by pentecostal leaders and hoping baptist & CoC churches would sign up, but baptists didn’t want high-road Christians like Phil Baker as their spokesperson.
So that brand didn’t take off as planned, and subsequently Australian Christian Churches became the new name for the Assemblies of God in Australia, since they owned the trademark.
So in terms of churches “professing, teaching and living reformed conservative Christianity”, I think that there’d be plenty of churches here that fit that descriptor, depending how you defined it.
Most baptist churches for example might fit the mould broadly, but wouldn’t want to be put in a box, and wouldn’t want Peter Jensen to be our spokesperson (though better him than Phil Baker). So maybe a brand might not be the best thing.
For a slightly narrower set of churches, “churches well-represented at Adelaide Mens Convention” probably approximates the reformed sort of churches you’re thinking of. That prob equates to evanglicans, brethren, ex-union-baptists, presby, & others so maybe 30 churches in Adelaide (not many in the western half btw) including five on the big list. Stacks more if you add some CoC and UCA Hope network (which again is overwhelmingly eastern half).
Anyway I love your vision and desire to strengthen the Church in Adelaide, and I will always be at your service for anything in the maps & numbers dept!
Reply to Eric@Eric: Thanks for the comments. I really do want to sharpen these ideas into something useful and practical…
I’m with you in that God works more broadly than through a single ‘type’ of church. and I can see how ‘winning the city’ should be thought of more broadly and in terms like ‘seeing people in that city turning to Jesus, and the whole body of Christ working to make disciples in every group of people in the city.’
I’m not denying that that God can work broadly but i’m thinking tactics: Not just what church _could_ do that kind of winning, but what kind of church has the _best chance_ of doing that kind of winning. That is to ‘narrow in’ on a theology that best equips churches to win the city as you and i would like to see it. For me, I see that reformed conservative theology is the right fit.
Great point about men’s convention attending churches. hadn’t thought about it but i think you’re right.
Also good re: ACC. I dont mean brand in terms of style of service or church (as reflected in their tag line). i’d want that to be flexible. I’m more in for theological cohesion and commitment to the need for harvesting and harvesters. So that would play out more in pooling resources and using the brand to gospel advantage than having a spokesperson. i.e. a church with this brand (as i see it atm) would, with the other churches, use money and effort to raise/train leaders, fund churches in poor parts of the city, evangelise and bring in a harvest.
I know…and this is probably the showstopper unless something changes…most existing churches won’t want in. Adelaide’s a very parochial place. But i’ll keep scheming and putting it out there and see what comes of it.
Reply to reuben