In the past couple of years, several books that use numbers, real life examples, and hard facts to find the root causes for different trends have have been published and popularized.
The book "UnChristian" used polls and the resulting statistics in an effort to analyze how people see Christians.
"Breakout Churches" looked at churches who had moved from a state of stagnancy to a growing state and examined how exactly that change took place.
I am currently reading a book titled "Outliers" that studies the true underlying causes for success.
This is a pretty prevalent style of writing in recent years - maybe before but I wouldn't know - and it leads the reader to some really cool insights and a new way of thinking. Maybe this is why I came to identify a peculiar trend I was familiar with from a few years back and ask the question - why would so many students from such a small church in such a small town choose ministry in such a short amount of time?
I won't suggest that this blog is anything like those books or even that it is written well, but it was inspired by them in a way. Read on.
If you are from Nebraska, you may familiar with all this, but it may be that you are not - in which case that information is irrelevant. I talked to my friend Arick today to get some of the details about this church. Arick is currently preaching at a church in Washington - and he is one of no fewer than 7 who are either in full time ministry or are married to someone who is... all in the span of 5 high school classes.
This town has a population of about 850 people and the church wasn't any bigger than 200. They didn't have a second minister on staff until these students were at a fairly advanced age. The youth ministry was larger than what is normal for the church size, but not exceptionally so. Taken at face value, it doesn't look like there was much reason for most of them to make the decisions they did. Some very large churches with great youth ministries aren't sending people into full time ministry or Bible College at that rate.
Now, I know the preaching minister at the time was a great guy, and the couple doing the youth ministry was doing a really good job. I also know that many of these students came from good families with parents who had attended Bible College themselves. A few indicators of this sort of thing existed, but I think those things exist elsewhere without such results.
From 1999-2004, no fewer than 17 of their graduating Seniors went on to attend Bible College - with most of them earning at least an associate's degree. At least 5 are currently in full time ministry, and two ended up marrying guys who are currently full time ministers. One more was an army chaplain and another has spent time doing ministry. Those are not standard numbers.
While I was in college, three different churches sent abnormal amounts of students to school. This one and another were small towns with no great explanation as to why... except that both had this in common - they gave their students great scholarships.
The town about which I am writing has a "Timothy Fund" that pays 1/2 tuition. They were serious about wanting their students to continue their Bible education and continue into ministry.
I would suggest that many more are called to full time vocational ministry than ever do it. It seems like this church managed to narrow the gap between the dids and the didn'ts - at least in this span of 5 years.
Yeah, that small church and small town happened to have an exceptional group of students - but I would venture a guess that half of them wouldn't or couldn't have attended Bible college or gone into ministry without their church's bold statement.
If churches really want their students to take a bold step, they need to put their money where their mouth is!
Amen!!
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