Swollen numbers...
by Tim Bayly on February 2, 2013 - 3:46pm
Check out this post on counting church attendance by Pastor Conrad Mbewe of Kabwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia. It ends:
So, next time you visit Africa with your camera and take pictures of a congregation in any of our African townships or villages, easily divide the attendance by a quarter in order to arrive at the regular attendance of that church. The other three-quarters were not gathered in order to deceive you but simply because you were the most important event in the area and the people did not want to miss out. You can be sure that as soon as you got into your car and left, the congregation melted faster than ice when put on a red-hot stove.
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Another version of the swollen numbers problem: the practice of reporting churches by the numbers of names on the church roll and not the actual butts-on-seats attendance. This is why the SBC can claim 16m members, but in reality, only 6m of them are in church on 'any given Sunday', and some of those will not be formal 'business members' either.
The Episcopal Church claimed just shy of 2 million members in the U.S. in 2010 and their membership has probably decreased since then. However, their average Sunday attendance (ASA) is estimated at ~600,000. So it's just not the Southern Baptists that are doing this.
The healing revival in America in the late 1940s and 1950s produced some interesting numbers also and it's a problem that continues today.
By the late 50s, some inside and some outside the movement were making criticisms of the "revival." One item was preaching tours by evangelists in foreign countries.
G.L. Montgomery, a former associate of Oral Roberts, was one who had the unenviable task of correcting his brethren. Several evangelists reported that 3 million conversions had happened in Jamaica. Montgomery pointed out that the population of the island (at that time) was 1.6 million.
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