How Big is the Mission Field?

Originally posted at "Stories of LINC North Texas"


In the church we talk a lot about reaching the city and transforming the community.  But just how large is that mission field, and can we really reach it with our traditional methods?  There's about 120,000 people here in Carrollton, where our offices are.  Add in Farmers Branch, and there are more than 53,000 households in the school district.  Through SALI, we are able to reach about 900 of them.  And we thought that we had an enormous impact on the community!

A quick check of the statistics shows that the average Christian church has184 members (although half of all churches have 75 members or less).  The largest LCMS church has around 2500 in attendance every Sunday.  At this rate, it would take 652 average American Christian churches to record every person in Carrollton alone as a member.  It would take 48 of the largest LCMS church in America.  Fellowship Church in Grapevine is listed as the third-largest church by attendance in the entire USA, and they have approximately 24,000 attendees every Sunday.  That means it would take 5 Fellowships in Carrollton alone to reach the entire city!

Based on these numbers, is it even possible to reach the entire city with our current strategies?  After seeing these numbers, it's no surprise that you never find a traffic jam on a Sunday morning!  Most churches seek to grow through addition of new members, but these numbers are depressing....a church would have to grow extremely large just to meet a significant number of people in a single small city.  Jesus transformed the entire world, but he didn't seem interested in addition.  In fact, he focused on just twelve men, growing extra-close to just 3 of them.  He believed in the strategy of multiplication.

It's said that Billy Graham, were he to be holding his crusades daily today, would not even be able to keep up with the global rate of population growth.  We need to embrace a strategy of multiplication if we want to have any hope of transforming our communities, cities, and the world!

Perspective

Everything depends on your vantage point.  I've been thinking about this subject of perspective lately.  As an embarrasingly simplified example, it's the difference between giving a kid a piece of candy and taking half of another kid's Halloween bounty.  One kid is happy, the other angry.  It's silly, but unavoidably true, and furthermore applicable to more of our lives than we'd like to admit.

Two years ago, I would have told you that the salary I make today would be luxurious to live on.  Today, I feel comfortable, but I'd be willing to bet that five years from now I would be feeling hopelessly endangered to make what I make today.  Are my needs changing that much?  Some things do, but not to the extent that we feel.  I see people who make six figures and they feel financially constrained because they have grown accustomed to such a lifestyle.

I don't feel the need to judge such a situation, because I imagine that someday it'll be me.  I'd like to think I will avoid this particular perspective trap, and always remember what it was like to be making $1000 per month in 2008, but as humans we like being comfortable.  I wonder how many other of life's situations this problem of perspective applies to?  At work I've moved from an open cubicle to a desk in the corner of a room to a larger desk still in the corner.  From this perspective, I'm not even sure what it'd be like to have an office with a door. Someday, however, that may be the norm for me!  How do we keep from letting our perspectives change so much?