gabeandheidi - How much does it cost to win someone to Christ?

How much does it cost to win someone to Christ?

I met a missionary from Madagascar back in June. He's led thousands of natives to faith in Jesus Christ and planted hundreds of churche...

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I met a missionary from Madagascar back in June.

He's led thousands of natives to faith in Jesus Christ and planted hundreds of churches over the last three years. He's not American, he's a native Malagasy (I think that's what you call someone from Madagascar, at least according to my quick Google search :).

Want to know how much it costs him to lead one Malagasy to Jesus? About fifty cents.

That is, if you take the total yearly cost of his ministry and divide by the number of new disciples of Jesus, he wins two people to Jesus for every dollar spent.

It made me wonder how much it costs me to lead one person to Jesus... so if I go back and add up the costs of all the ministry training I can remember from the last 20 years (seminary, conferences, trips, trainings, books, etc), and if I divide that number by the number of people I've won to Christ, the answer makes me sick to my stomach (I actually worked up an Excel spreadsheet).

It costs me $29,325 to win someone to Christ.

Pathetic, huh?

Is your metric better than mine? (I hope so).

How about your church's metric? Take the total annual budget of your church and divide by the number of new Christians your church "produced" last year. What's the answer? How much does it cost your church to win someone to Christ?

How can it cost my friend $.50 to fulfill the Great Commission but it costs me nearly $30,000? Something's wrong here.