| New Church DevelopmentNew Churches Make A Difference
By Dr. Montfort C. Duncan Jr.,
Executive Director, New Church Development
 Recently,
I completed a study of our new churches in the Florida Conference. The
base of the study was the new churches since 1995 and the remainder of
all other churches in the conference.
I looked at the following areas: profession of
faith, total church expenditures, average membership, average
attendance, net 2002 change, 2003 apportionments and total 2002
expenditures. What follows are the results of the study.
Members Attendance Prof. of Faith Net Change
Apportionments Total Exp.
An. Conf. 2002 TBS TBS 2.6% TBS TBS TBS
New Churches 6,833 6,716 9.4% +1,416 $499,342
per 15 $4,669,831
chartered churches
(2.1% of all appor.)
(TBS: to be supplied by the conference
statistician at the Florida Annual Conference Event May 27-31.)
The following are facts that were learned from
statistics for new churches for 2002:
 The
Profession of Faith ratio for new church starts was 42.6 per church.
The Profession of Faith ratio for all churches was 11.5 per church.
The new church starts Profession of Faith ratio is 370 percent greater
than for all existing churches.
Average
new church apportionments is $33,289
If all
churches gave at that rate, the conference budget would be $24,434,000
for 2003.
Average
total expenditures per new church were $292,000. Average total
expenditures per all conference churches were $311,322.
New churches produce disciples and support the
mission and ministry of our conference in a strong way. If we are
going to take seriously Jesus’ command to “Go and make disciples,”
then support of new church starts is one of the best investments this
annual conference can make.
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