Food for Thought…
Ok..so I just got back from vacation and I was doing some deep thinking. Just how wasteful is the American church? Well, it’s impossible to tell, but I did a little figuring. Now my figures are very conservative and I’m sure I could have come up with much bigger numbers…but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t over stating my case.
It is estimated that there are well over 335,000 protestant churches in America. Those are bricks and mortar churches. Not counting the house churches and organic church like ours. So, let’s say there are 300,000 total Christian churches. If the annual cost of construction, maintenance, and general repairs on the building were $100,000 per church, that would mean we are spending $30 billion dollars on buildings. Now, it won’t be that much at some churches, and it will be much more at others. But then, let’s add the average salary of a pastor. Rather than take into consideration the really big churches, I just took the average salary of a small-church pastor, which Gallup says is around $35,000. With 300,000 churches that comes to $10.5 billion per year! Combining both the building costs and the salaries, the American church as a whole spends $40.5 billion per year. Now, let’s say that I really did overstate these figures. Let’s cut that number in half. Let’s say it’s only $20 billion per year. Remember, that’s just building and one pastor’s salary! What would that kind of money do?
It would pay for:
60,000 wells built in central
130,000 water tanks constructed in middle east
48 million children fed for 1 day or 133,000 children fed for an entire year in many third-world countries
164,000 sheep in a third-world country
80 million malaria treatment plants in
OR
go a LONG way to help alleviate poverty for 36 million Americans living below the poverty line!
Not to rant, but that’s a lot of good we could be doing! I know I’m preaching to the choir, but sometimes it’s good to see in black and white a confirmation of what we are doing! I’m so glad that we are committed to using our resources for REAL ministry at Perimeter Pointe!