In an era where people are cutting budgets and becoming energy efficient, the church must do the same. I’m not talking about the electric bill and “going green.” One area of waste, fraud, and abuse within the church is the money and time that people give to church programs. Are we truly getting a significant return on our vast expenditures in these areas?

Studies show that on average, a church has three conversions per year for every 100 people who attend. These are actual conversions, not just people transferring from one church to another. Based on this statistic, let’s look at how much money and time churches spend on average to gain these three conversions.

Money
It is estimated that the cost of running a church is about $1700 each year for each regular attendee. This number is within ballpark range for small churches and mega churches. A church of 50, with a building and one pastor, costs about $85,000 per year to operate. A mega-church, like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community Church, costs $34 million for 20,000 in weekend attendance. Do the math to see if these numbers hold basically true for your church. You will probably be “within the ballpark.”

So if the average church gets three conversions for every 100 people, and the average church expense for 100 people is about $170,000, then the average expense per conversion is over $50,000.

Yes, yes, I know. A lot more is going on in church than just evangelism, and a lot of the money is spent on discipling those who believe. But still, one of the goals of discipleship should be evangelism. If people are being adequately trained, then the money spent on their training should result in a greater number of conversions. But it is not.

So the question becomes: Would you support a non-profit organization which had the stated goal of “evangelizing the lost” but spent over $50,000 for each convert? I don’t know about you, but I would have difficulty supporting such a ministry, especially if they had been doing this for 2000 years and their effectiveness became worse and worse over time.

Speaking of time, let’s look at an asset of the church even more valuable than money.

Time
Aside from the money spent on church, consider the cost in time. Though many spend only an hour or so in church activates per week, others spend much more. Some, such as the staff, devote 60 hours or more each week on church activities. Of course, this is their job. On average, a church member spends about three hours per week on church activities. This does not count the time they spend getting ready for church, driving to church, and going out for lunch after church. Nor does it include personal Bible study or prayer time during the week. This is time they actually spend in the church building or in a designated church program.

Three hours per week isn’t a whole lot when you realize that the average person watches that much television every single night of the week. But still, it appears that even these few hours spent on “church” accomplishes very little.

Three hours per person per week results in about 150 hours per year. So 100 people spend about 15,000 hours per year on “church activities.” Taking the average conversion rate of three conversions per 100 people, about 5000 hours go into each conversion. When you realize that a full-time job (40-hours per week) fills 2000 hours per year, each conversion takes two-and-a-half years of work-hours.

So again I ask, if you were supporting a missionary who had one conversion every two-and-a-half years, would you continue to support that missionary?

Yes, again, I know that some missionaries labor for 40 years without seeing a single missionary. But these stories are often followed up with the fact that when a new missionary arrived on the scene, they see hundreds or thousands of conversions in the first few years of work, not because they figured something out that their predecessor did not, but because the faithful missionary of 40 years had prepared the soil, planted the seed, and watered the ground. The new missionaries on the scene just happen to be there for the harvest. So statistically, we do expect the average conversion rate for missionaries to be much less than one conversion every two-and-a-half years.

Is this a good use of time and money?
Is all of this time and money really a good investment? Possibly. No price is too high for the single soul, and a lot more goes on in the typical church than just seeking conversions. For that $1700 and 150 hours per person, the people who attend also get friends, fellowship, encouragement, support, guidance, and spiritual education. So maybe it is all worth it.

But what if there were a more efficient way of providing all of this, while at the same time, seeing more people become followers of Jesus? In the coming weeks, I will propose a few.

Are you looking for some practical suggestions for way to give presence in your community? Here’s five I thought of real quick, some of which I am actively pursuing. I’m not talking about community service events, but places you can hang out just to get to know people.

If you know of others, leave them in the comment area below.

• Go to your local Chamber of Commerce or city website and get a community calendar, as well as a list of civic organizations and community service events. Then be present at as many of these events and projects as possible. Be the most active, joyful, service-minded citizens your city has ever seen.
• Join activity-based clubs such as hiking clubs, book clubs, and tourist clubs.
• Adopt a park and hang out there on a regular basis, cleaning and restoring it.
• Hang out a local bar or nightclub, getting to know the regulars, and blessing the owner with your business.
• Participate in the tractor-pulling contest or the art festival. Look around in the newspaper and on community bulletin boards for events that you can join.

In a previous post about cancelling your church service, one person commented that there were six other days for serving the community, and we should leave the Sunday church service alone.

I understand this concern, but the sad reality is that Christians do not use those six other days to love and serve their community. And another sermon series is not going to change this. Church leaders need to proactively show their members how to serve and who to love in the community, not just preach and teach about it.

Could this be done on Tuesday night instead of Sunday morning? Sure. But as we all know from decades of experience, less than 10% of the church will show up for a Tuesday night community service project. So once again, to get people out of the pews and into the community, the best time to do this may be on Sunday morning. Doing so is not really cancelling the church service; it’s putting service back in the “church service.”

Let’s look at this from the spiritual perspective. I’m fairly convinced that Satan doesn’t care too much if Christians have faithful church attendance. The more services we have, and the longer they are, the more delighted he is. Of course, he is just as happy if Christians don t get together with other believers at all, and just sit at home watching television.

And if that is the way Satan feels, God feels just about the opposite.

Just as God did not call us out of the world so we could sit at home watching television, He also did not call us out of the world so we could sit in a pew at church watching a sermon. The one thing God wants is the one thing Satan doesn’t: followers of Jesus who actually follow Jesus into the world.

So the reason for cancelling church services is not to just give people a break from church. It is to get followers of Jesus off the warm, padded pews in church, and out onto the cold, hard, concrete of the world where the people are.

How? Well, there is no one right way to do this. We have the freedom to be as creative and flexible as we want.

Maybe a good way to begin this is to have a regularly scheduled Sunday service where a service event is planned and announced in advance. Churches are notorious for having special Sunday events to get people to come to church. We have special speakers, choirs, and concerts. We schedule “Friend Day”  and “Back to Church Sunday.”  I recently saw one church in my area inviting people to attend “Orphan Sunday.”

I’m not fond of such special Sundays, but maybe if we can avoid the gimmicks one or two Sundays a month could be planned where the church does not try to get people into the pews, but out of them. You could call it “Back to Work Sunday.”  This might show people that the point of church is not to come to church, but for the church to go to the world.

If Christians are really concerned about orphans, rather than have a Sunday where we talk about orphans, we could have a Sunday where we go play with children in an actual orphanage, go participate in a fundraiser for adoptions, or host a family-fun day in the park for foster parents and their children.

If the leadership of a church was serious about reaching the people who don t come to church on Sunday, maybe a good strategy would be to find the places where these people already are on Sunday morning, and go join them rather than ask them to join us. Yes, you might end up tailgating at the football coliseum, fishing at the bass lake, or hiking mountain trails.

One church I am talking with, Mercer Island Covenant Church, cancelled their church service last March to either run or volunteer in the annual Rotary Club’s Half Marathon Run. They got a lot of positive feedback from the church members and the community, and met several community leaders in the process. They plan on doing the same thing again this year. That’s what I’m talking about!

I believe that if we genuinely participated in some of these things during the hours we were usually in church, more relationship building would take place in one month than often happens in an entire year of church services.

Do you know of any other churches that participate in community service or activities on Sunday morning? I would love to hear about them in the comment section below.