Friday, April 27, 2007

The Evangelical Covenant Church

continues to grow at an astounding rate:
The growth of the ECC continues on the same solid trajectory. Based on the November attendance survey, on any given weekend 166,000 people are worshipping in ECC congregations. This is a 3.1 percent increase. In the past ten years the ECC has grown by 56 percent. The total constituency of the ECC (those who would claim an ECC congregation as their church) is in excess of 250,000. Fully 22 percent of ECC congregations are ethnic or multi-ethnic.
If these trends continue, by the year 2020 the ECC will roughly be 275,000 in attendance in 1,100 churches, 36 percent of which will be ethnic and multi-ethnic. ECC and conference leadership will soon begin to look at these growth points with regard to structural capacity issues, leadership development, ECC identity and cohesion, and so on.

I've been doing this gig long enough to know that numbers are not all it's about. Like I've said before we could probably offer free beer and pizza after each service and see the numbers increase.

What I like seeing is that this historically white bunch of folks is growing mostly from our ethnic and multi-ethnic churches. Presently we see that 22 percent of the churches are churches of more colour. That is expected to increase to 36 percent by 2020.

Cool.

You can read more of the latest report here.

2 comments:

  1. Steve MenshenfriendApril 28, 2007 at 6:29 AM

    I hate to look like a Covenant poster boy. But, I love the Covenant. Great work ... to everyone at Gateway.

    ReplyDelete
  2. We heard these statistics at our Midwest Covenant Conference meeting this weekend. Indeed, God is doing some very cool stuff with bunch of Christians. I didn't grow up in the Covenant, but I'm glad I'm in it now.

    ReplyDelete



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