Recently, I had the pleasure of listening to Steve Hollinghurst from the Church Army, speak about relevant evangelism for today’s people. He quoted a statistic so startling to me that I had to email him and check I’d heard the figures right! So here’s the accurate figures he replied with:
Assume Billy Graham does a mission over several venues attended by 2 million people (this is about the figure for the Haringey Mission of 1954) each year. That’s about 40 nights (mission England was 40 nights long) in football stadiums with 50,000 in attendance. Experience shows that about 10% will come forward ( the mission England stat was 9.8%.) That is 200,000 over the mission and about 15% will still be in churches having come to faith for the first time several years later. Many who go forward are making re-commitments and with those who don’t stay, each mission effectively adds 30,000 people to the church. At this rate, one such mission a year would take about 800 years to convert the adult population of Britain. Actually, the UK population is growing at about 400,000 per year at present so sadly Billy and his successors would take even longer than that.
Alternatively assume the UK’s 3 million adult Christians (measured as regular churchgoers) each brought someone to faith every 5 years and discipled them to bring someone to faith every 5 years. It would then only take 25 years (actually a little less) for all the UK’s adults to be Christian as the church doubles in size every 5 years.
These figures don’t look at births versus deaths with any accurate projection nor child evangelism. The figures are just estimates but they are sensible ones and show the impact of every member evangelism.
Better get started then! Over to me and over to you!
