What's A Congregation Worth?

A recent Christianity Today article attempted to answer the question, “What’s a congregation worth?” The underlying question was, “Does a church’s tax exempt status outweigh the economic value it adds to its community?”

The researcher, a man by the name of Ram Cnaan, who describes himself as “nonreligious”, estimated the monetary value of an urban congregation at $476,663.24 annually. Included in that number are things like money spent in the community for goods and services, time spent helping to keep families together, educational services, volunteer time, employment services and even crime prevention.

For a number of years, there has been a growing perception that churches have become irrelevant, that we have nothing meaningful to say and that we have become a drain on society. It is encouraging to me that someone is taking time to try to put a value on what churches do.

But, from my perspective churches have (or I should say “should have”) a lot more value that ends up going unnoticed simply because it can’t be quantified in dollars and cents.

How many people can be touched by one person who takes their eyes off of personal gain and begins to try to love their neighbor as they love themselves? How many kind words will one person speak in a lifetime? How many times will that person pat someone on the back or treat someone like they really matter and how will the person who has been touched find their life changed? How is the world a better place because one person understood what Jesus did for them and then tried to live their life sacrificially?

Think of the impact of one faithful person and then multiply that one person by twenty or a hundred. What is the impact of a congregation on the community in which they live? This may be the place where the word “priceless” truly applies.

People who see the church as simply a building or as a social gathering are missing the point. In New Testament Greek the word for church is “ecclesia” which means “those who are called.” We are supposed to be those who have been called out of the world to represent and serve Jesus every day. I think the question that the churched and the un-churched alike should be asking is, “How much impact does the ecclesia have on the community in which they live?”

If we, the followers of Jesus, aren’t making our new life in Christ real every day then there is something radically wrong with our relationship to Jesus. If we, who claim the name of Jesus, aren’t continually thinking about how we might love the Lord our God and how we might love our neighbors as ourselves (and then doing all we can to make that real) then we might want to think again about claiming to represent Jesus.

Asking what a congregation is worth is an interesting sociological study, but the question that might have more meaning is the one we ask ourselves. What difference does it make that I am a follower of Jesus?