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.
Jeremy,
I am not sure we can really measure efficiency in these terms. I can think of several missionaries who gave their lives without ever seeing a convert. I do however agree that the way we do church is more like a business providing a service than a ministry, and as such maybe it is apropriate to measure them like we would a business. Not sure that most churches would survive if they had to operate under the same guidelines as normal businesses.
I see this in my ministry with the homeless all the time. We have several different churches, some even from the same denomination, each working independantly of one another. The result of this has been that on some days, there are 2-3 evening meals served, many times to the same people, and on other days, there are no meals provided. We have worked to bring some of these churches together to combine resources and cover more days or to make the meals more accessable. We have seen some success, but there are some who still hold to doing their own thing and the result is that food often is wasted.
This is the very reason that we choose not to do our own thing at all, but rather to come alongside existing ministries and to work to build relationships with them. Our primary ministry has been to simply reach out in relationship to those on the streets and with those serving them. This has enables us to make at least some progress in streamlining services while remaining relatively neutral. I am not sure how the churches move beyond this need to leave their individual fingerprint on a ministry opportunity and begin looking for the most effective and cost concious way to reach those in need.
FedEx,
President,
Men of Praise Motorcycle Ministry
Awesome! That is what I’m talking about.
I agree that ministry is not all about seeing conversions. I was a little reluctant to make this post for that very reason.
So in future follow-up posts, I will suggest some different ways of measuring success, different goals churches can have, and maybe different ways of achieving those goals than the standard “come to church for songs and a sermon” strategy that has been followed for so many centuries.
Hi Jeremy!
I found this post intriguing and exciting, basically because you have gone out of your way to acknowledge that churches do need some method, whatever it is, of measuring efficiency.
Our church is 15 years old and during that period our nunber of regular attendees eventually rose to hover around the two hundred and fifty mark. Yet something was bothering me. How did we really know if we were being effective with regard to the Great Commission, which has at its core activities such as preaching the gospel, laying hands on the sick, casting out demons, and making disciples.
Could I, as in a pure business model, use these as my core goals and measure efficiency based on how we were fulfilling these goals alone? What about other, shall I call them ‘soft issues’ or non-core issues like, family counseling, youth ministry, childrens’s ministry, community upliftment, marriage support, involvement in local cahllenges facing our community, being the moral compass in our city, etc etc.
Surely all these are part of the ‘Kingdom’ mandate of the church? The amount of measurable and even intangible variables by which the efficiency and dare I say efficacy of a church could be measured began to mount up to a really confusing number.
Eventually I got hold of Christian Schwarz’s book “Natural Church Development” which was developed based on his research with thousands of churches across the world looked at the ‘quality’ of churches because his findings seemed to surprisingly indicate that the quality of a church was the number one factor in the nemerical growth of a church. This was great news for me and I was relieved to find that he had narrowed it down to eight basic quality characteristics.
Schwarz identified these eight quality characteristics which, when all are present to a sufficient degree will practically guarantee numerical growth. These characteristics are as follows:
Empowering leadership
Gift-oriented ministry
Passionate spirituality
Functional structures
Inspiring worship service
Holistic small groups
Need-oriented evangelism
Loving relationships
Our next problem arose with measuring these characteristics. We used the generic questionnaire provided by Schwarz but had major problems with the level of the English seeing as we are a third world country in South Africa with eleven (?!! I know..), official languages and huge disparities in the level of education between congregants. I eventually decided that instead of using everyone, to help with the assessment, we would first start with the more educated who would understand the questions easily and would be able to give a measurable response.
At this time our church was at about 75 members and about 30 questionnaires were returned which gave us a fairly representative response. This procedure has been very effective in helping us shape our church character and build our ethos and hone our practises as well as curtail our expenses to focus on and meet only the requirements of these eight basic building blocks.
The second challenge was to design a plan for strategically increasing or building in the areas where the resulting analysis of the responses from the questionnaires indicated a less that desirable score, such as below 60%. The book indicates one should use one’s strenths to make a positive impact on one’s weaknesses. This worked very well for us.
However, even with a good score in all eight areas, we managed to grow to 250 members and now we’re experiencing a decline due to unknown factors which we need to perhaps analyse and discover.
One of the issues I tried to deal with is the efficiency of our retention of members. Our home cell system is a funtional structure which has helped with building stronger relationships and works well among the yout who are highly relational at this stage of their human development, but I still feel we are missing it somewhere.
So I’m looking forward to your next posts.
Robin Fisher
Senior Pastor
Word of Faith Community Church
Cape Town
South Africa
Jeremy,
Do you know if this $1700 a year per member includes community outreach and mission? Or, is this purely the cost of facilities and staff payroll?
That number was a “total church budget” number, so it would include community outreach and missions (which tends to be a fairly small percentage in most church budgets).
Thanks for the feedback. I haven’t been to a “brick-and-mortar church” for years. Thinking about plugging back in mainly for the fellowship aspect.
Problem is, I would feel obligated to “tithe” so as to not take advantage of the facilities and programs at someone else’s expense. But then, I don’t agree with the budget – when less than 5% of a church budget goes to community outreach or missions, something is terribly wrong.
So, I’m thinking to drop enough in the plate to cover the edifice and the staff salaries. But I would want to do this in addition to what we currently have set aside for benevolence in our budget. All in all, that makes the “brick-and-mortar church” a very expensive social club. To support the staff and building, based on average church budget breakdowns, it would be reasonable to drop $33 in the offering plate every week… That’s $143 a month – maybe I should just find a christian coffee shop to hang out in…. $143 a month would buy a lot of coffee and pastries 🙂
Ha! Depending on the size of the church, if you never gave a dime, they wouldn’t know. But if you benefit from the services they provide, it is probably fitting to support them in some way. Either way, I love how you describe the brick-and-mortar church as an expensive social club. That is exactly what it is!