Computing the odds of finding a Person of Peace in the United States

Yesterday, Steve Addison posted “Finding 100 fold leaders (http://www.movements.net/2013/04/18/finding-cpm-leaders.html) ,” in which he quotes Jeff Sundell, a CPM trainer, who said “For every 300 people he trains, he expects to find one church planting movement leader.”

Sundell works in the United States (and if you are interested in CPM training in the USA I highly recommend his work). He is training people who have expressed an interest in CPM – so the question is, how many of those who come for CPM training actually use what they’ve learned? This is a little different than finding a Person of Peace, but it runs somewhat parallel. It gets at part [d] of my definition of a Person of Peace: that they multiply.

How does this stack up against “The odds of finding a Person of Peace (http://www.justinlong.org/2013/04/odds-of-finding-a-person-of-peace/) “? Data points like this are a great way to explore and potentially prove or disprove a theory.

First, let’s see what our expected % chance of finding a Person of Peace should be. Therein we run into our first problem. In the Atlas of Global Christianity, the United States had a Christian 10-year growth rate of 0.85%–vs. the population’s growth rate of 1.00%. When Christianity is growing slower than the population, the result is obvious. Over the past hundred years, the Atlas reveals the sad but familiar story: on the one hand, it grew from 91.4 million members in 1910 to 283 million members in 2010. On the other, Christianity was 96% of the USA in 1910, and today it’s 81%. (That’s Christians of all traditions, mind. If you were to just include Protestants/Independents/Anglicans, or only evangelicals, it would be a far lower percentage yet.) How does this affect the odds of finding a Person of Peace? It would seem to make it nearly impossible, given our formula. I’m not sure what the answer to that is; if you have an idea, please let me know.

Let’s take a different direction. Obviously, Sundell’s finding some People of Peace (at least in a sense), but the growth rate of Christianity in the country might suggest he wouldn’t. Perhaps Christianity as a whole is too big. Maybe the People of Peace in America would have a predisposition against some traditions, and for other traditions. This is the percentage chance, after all, that a PoP will “reveal him or herself.”

There are 6 broad confessional traditions of Christianity represented in America: Anglican, Catholic, Independent, marginal, Orthodox and Protestant. Each of these are experiencing significantly different growth rates. Anglicans grew at -0.35% (decline), Protestants at 0.9%. The other traditions grew at or faster than the population for 2000-2010: Catholics, 1%; Independents, 1.12%; Marginals, 1.13%; and Orthodox, 1.19%.

Catholics make up 84 million and are growing at 1.0%. Their growth rate matches the population as a whole; most of it comes from births. We can exclude them as there is no viral movement happening there.

Protestants are 61 million, growing at 0.9%. Protestants aren’t exceeding the population as a whole: people are jumping ship from mainstream Protestantism, so we can safely ignore that tradition, too.

Independents are 73 million, growing at 1.12%. What if “People of Peace” were oriented more toward the Independent stream of the church? What if they were more likely to reveal themselves, join, and begin connecting their networks to Independent churches? Remove the demographic rate of 1.0%, and you have a conversion growth rate of 0.12%. This would equate to 0.1 per 100 or 1 per 1,000.

How does this stack up against Sundell’s 1-in-300 figure? The people he is training are being drawn from larger communities of churches. 1-in-300 is about 3 per 1,000, which isn’t that far off from my 1 per 1,000.

It might be interesting to see what the growth rates of the networks are in which Sundell moves. That could drive the rate up higher. Another issue could be a minor bit in the math; while the Atlas for Global Christianity estimates the decadal growth rate at 1.12%, Operation World estimates the annual growth rate of Independents at 1.5% (which would equate to 5 per 1,000).

This tells us that it could be useful to compute the probabilities of finding a Person of Peace on the fringes of a specific tradition, because in places where Christianity forms a large part of the country, People of Peace may very well be unresponsive to large sections of the cultural church. On the other hand, one has to be careful not to get too specific – very small churches or denominations can have very high growth rates, but this is not as meaningful; it’s rather like the church that does well on its once a year Easter service and whose jazzy services attract seekers and some potential converts, but the gospel is not passing relationally, no one is multiplying discipleship, and the model won’t scale.