1% conversion rate is doable
Written by Alan Vink
Dear Pastors
Yes…..you read that right….1%......just 1% annual conversion rate.
This week I want to create a realistic scenario. Please hang in with me for a few moments.
Let’s imagine that as gospel believing churches in NZ we agree to a corporate goal of reaching 1% of New Zealanders next year and every year thereafter.
The calculation will look something like this.
As I write this morning, NZ’s resident population is 4,799,986 to be exact.
Let’s round it up to 5,000,000 men, women and children for easy reckoning(and which it probably will be in January next year).
1% of 5 million is 50,000 people.
Let’s assume there are 3000 gospel believing churches in NZ1.
Therefore if every church ‘owned’ the corporate goal of 1% conversion rate that would mean every church would need to see 16.6 people on average reached next year (trust me I used to be a Maths teacher!) But it is not quite as simple as that.
If we spread our 50,000 new Christians over our 3000 churches we would need to factor in current church size to make this goal ‘fair’. A small church would try and reach say…. about 7-8 people next year, a medium size church(150-250 attendance)2 about 17 people, and a large church 25+ people. And that’s saying nothing about the superb effort many para-church ministries are contributing to this goal as well which would be over and above. This seems to me that this is doable doesn’t it?
Another way you could look at this is on a monthly basis. That would mean that the 3000 churches in NZ would need to reach 1.4 people a month every month of the year. This too seems doable doesn’t it?
Now let’s imagine we have no drop off rate(or very small) and we are achieving 1% of NZ’s population conversion rate every year. In 10 years we have reached another 10%. That being so we would now have 20% (i.e. 10% existing and 10% new) of NZ’s population attending gospel believing churches. According to missiologists and sociologists we now could make a significant impact on our nation3.
But the most beautiful thing of all is that at least another 50,000 people will be in God’s family and Christ followers and that would be so very good, wouldn’t it?
I am one who genuinely believes4 this is a doable goal with God’s help but with this big BUT, only if we agreed on this together and then got to work on this together. We would definitely need God’s help to achieve the together thingy wouldn’t we?
Something to think about.
Blessings
Alan
1 No one knows how many churches we have in NZ. And beside it changes every week. 3000 is a reasonable estimate.
2 Most of the 3000 churches in NZ are small or medium size currently.
3 A town or village in NZ could do this kind of strategizing to reach their communities and in doing so contribute to the national goal.
4 Here are two minutes of my pontifications about this issue at the Global Cities Conference in Sydney in May this year.
Interesting: This is worth a look. This is Luke Collis at work. I commend him to you.
Alan Vink is currently the Executive Director for LeadershipWorx. Prior to this role he has been the Executive Director of Willow Creek Association NZ (WillowNZ), a Baptist pastor (23 years), Bible College teacher, and church consultant.