EngineeredTheology

I did some quick statistics check from the Barna Group to see how many people give regularly to a church. The statistics I’ll quote are from this article, but I’ll use generic terms because the article’s definitions of “evangelical” and “born-again” are a little deceiving.

Less than 10% of card carrying christians give a substantial portion of their income (churches, not for profits, etc). Of the “active” subset of those, around 25% give substantially. The assumption I will make is that people who give money, are often the same group who give of their time (it is one thing to give $10 a week to starving kids in china and feel like you did your part, but I have a tough time believing people would give many thousands of dollars a year to something and not be at least somewhat invested in what is going on). At the same time, I can imagine there are some very active christians who do not give significantly. That being said, I can not expect there are a large subset of people who are willing to meet needs with significant investments in time without similar efforts to meet financial needs.

Since not 100% of the people walking through a church door are “active”, let alone card carrying, I’ll make another assumption. I will give that 25% of churchgoers are spending significant portions of their time or money to advance what they feel like christianity is telling them to do.

Now, what if? What if church asked one Sunday for those 75% of people who are just taking up space to stay home that week (then asked the same thing the next week, and the week after until they got the hint)? By giving this many christians the pink slip, church would just dramatically decrease its overhead (both monetary and resource needs) without having any significant impact on income or manpower. The church now has 300% more resources to actually help people. Time to mentor the people who are actually doing something. Money to give to those who actually need it (and time to oversee that money to ensure it is actually doing some good). Time to take care of people in trouble, instead of wasting time pandering to the apathetic.

Of course the idea is crazy, but I’m having a tough time figuring out why…