Thursday, May 25, 2006

Laws of Large Numbers and Frog Kissing

Last Saturday night a fellow minister with the IPHC had his first meeting of his new Church Plant.  E-4 International Church.  It was a classic case of an implementation of the Law of Large Numbers according to a Pastor Dr. Barry Kolb.  I had heard about this but never quite as succinctly as this.
 
What the Church Plant had done is electronically contacted 40,000
people and asked them to respond to a short questionnaire. 
 
According to Barry, that 40,000 should have yielded 400 yes responses and 40 actual attendees. 
 
Turns out, that was pretty darn close. We had 300 who said yes.  120 who said they would come and about 30 who showed.
 
Then last night in a conversation with a friend about how hard it is for young people to meet someone (we're both not real young anymore, both married which means we did meet someone and that therefore makes us experts) the discussion actually came down to the same thing.  If you are going to find enough frogs to kiss, (you gotta kiss a lot of frogs if you want to find a prince) you have (watch me mix this metaphor here) to fish in a bigger pond.
 
To put it another way, if frogs are your objective in prince seeking you should avoid spending much time in the desert even if you dearly love the desert.  This is doubly important if you are looking for a particular type of prince which must meet a list of non negotiables.  Can't be this, must be that.
 
When we had the Church in Geneva honestly we had great worship, good preaching (even when I preached), good fellowship and lots of couples.  Singles who showed up enjoyed what was going on but didn't last long.  They were hunting for frogs.  We didn't have frogs.  They ended up the road at the big seeker church in town or way up the road at the mother seeker church.  Mass quantities of frogs. 
 
Theology be danged, where do you keep the frogs?

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