Lausanne World Pulse – Assessing the Consequences of Preaching to a Larger Audience

October 2006

By Perrin Werner

Every year the International Bulletin of Missionary Research publishes a table describing the status of the Church’s global mission. Among the numerous statistics that make up this year’s table are two of special interest: (1) the number of evangelism-hours and (2) the number of hearer-hours per year. On their own they are significant enough, but taken together they have some very important light to shed upon the state of global Christianity.

What these statistics try to document is every hour of evangelism and every hour of listening to the gospel that takes place in a given year. So, for example, if I spent one hour sharing the gospel with a group of ten people, one hour of evangelism and ten hours of listening would have taken place (one hour for each person). When taken together, one can calculate a ratio. In 1900 there were five billion hours spent in sharing the gospel, and ten billion listening hours accumulated, or two hours of hearing for every hour of preaching (2:1 ratio). There is a certain amount of intimacy that can be seen in this statistic.

While certainly there were evangelists speaking to large groups, the ratio implies that the majority of evangelism happened in small groups or face-to-face. This intimacy will be described by the word “space” throughout the remainder of this article and refers to the intimacy between the hearer and the speaker (not humans and God). While intimacy can be understood to mean the personal knowledge shared between two people, in this context it is simply referring to the ratio of hearing-hours to evangelizing-hours. The greater the ratio is between speaking and hearing groups, the further the space and the lower the intimacy.

Our goal has become getting people into the hallway (of Christiandom). Which room they choose after that is often considered a matter of little consequence.

Today the ratio is nearly six to one. While in 1900 the majority of evangelism took place one-on-one or in small groups, today the presentation of the gospel appears to favor a slightly larger setting. No doubt this increase is related to the boom in communication technology during the twentieth century. But while technology has effectively turned up the preacher’s volume—and drawn a larger audience—it has, nonetheless, caused the crowd to stand a little further from the stage.