Worship Fuel

No, this isn’t the title of a new, trendy youth service. This is my prediction of where things are going in regard to churches and ministries if the world energy situation re-aligns (which I think it is doing right now).

In the future, I think groups of Christians will meet in a more distributed, local fashion. These smaller groups will be linked via technology. Spiritual leadership will be more formally centralized, and administrative leadership will be more disitributed.

Some places are starting to do this already, with multiple campuses and home small group meetings. But current scale is way, way lower than it will eventually be. I’m thinking it will be 30-40 formal locations (the local strip mall, the clubhouse at apartments, the old taco bell), and a whole bunch (maybe hundreds) of home locations.

Why? Efficiency and community.

For example, with regard to efficiency:

• Say 3000 people attend your church.
• Average family of four equals 750 vehicles.
• Average fuel economy: 26mpg…but we’ll assume 20mpg for in-town driving, SUV’s, idling, etc.
• Average miles to place of worship? We’ll assume 15 round trip. Conservative.
• That’s 750 vehicles travelling 15 miles, divided by 20 mpg: 562.5 total gallons for fuel burned.
• At 4 dollars per gallon, that’s $2,250 dollars per week. $117,000 per year for the congregation.
• At 6 dollars per gallon, that’s $175,000.
• At 10 dollars per gallon, that’s $292,500.
• And that’s just for sundays…not counting wednesdays and other activities.
• A few years ago, it was about 50 grand.

So it’s starting to get mighty inefficient to have thousands of people hitting the road and rollin’ to the church house. At a minimum, we’re starting to look at 4-5 dollars per trip to church per member. It doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up. And in the aggregate it’s kind of silly.

And these are conservative numbers. It would be pretty realistic to increase that round trip figure and lower the average fuel efficiency. What about 10-15 dollars per round trip? Are we going to expect everyone to pay $120/month in fuel to go to church on Sunday’s and Wednesdays?

I think God’s church needs to start thinking about this. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with large, central church buildings at all. In fact, I think they’re great. But they grew up in an era of really cheap go-juice, and a huge building with hundreds of SUV’s will become more and more impractical. The megachurch of the future will probably not have a huge building–just lots of people staying connected in local branch meeting places.