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.
I wonder how we measure up when we assess the cost of making a disciple. That seems to be the only number Jesus cared about, and even then, he seemed to work at making it difficult.
I’m not sure how much stock I put in these conversion stats, although it sure indicates commitment and fervor.
Seth,
Once we get to the point where our disciples are making disciples who are making disciples, the “cost” goes down. That’s what he achieved.
I think we have it upside down. I’m finding more kingdom-bringers who are discipling people to conversion; not converting then discipling.
that is an interesting post and follow-up comment, gabe. seems to be the most new converts i have met in recent years have been produced through discipling to conversion through the 12 step sponsoring process. as i mentioned in earlier conversation, in the US the recovery community seems to be one of the rare fields that are ripe for harvest. i wonder if Jesus would have us keep trying to harvest fields that are not ripe or pack up and move overseas to harvest the ones that are ready. (or find the few ripe fields where we live…)
i suppose young people (our children) might be another ripe field. and training them to disciple/bring others to the faith would produce the multiplication effect as well.
Gabe,
I like the model of “kingdom-bringers who are discipling people to conversion; not converting then discipling.” God keeps reinforcing his “they will know you by your love” whether the “they” is lost or found.
Further in. Further up.