Remember Steve Martin in The Jerk?
Navin R. Johnson: The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!
Harry Hartounian: Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.
Navin R. Johnson: Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Johnson, Navin R.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people. I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.
That’s how I feel right now. We just got in The Free Press Book of Lists for 2007. It lists all things Hays, including "Average Area Church Attendance (as reported by the church)" It’s funny they had to put the disclaimer, "as reported by the church." What? Do they think a church would spin the numbers? Naw. Well, some churches look like they put in their membership totals. Our membership is actually somewhat smaller than our attendance, which we believe is healthy. We always have more people coming in that we want to move toward membership. Okay, so we gave them our pre-Easter totals, but we made the list. We’re #7, the perfect number.
Okay, so as I’m sitting here thinking about it, I realize how off those numbers are. But if they were true, then this is what we can say: 8936 people from the Kyle/Buda area are in church on any given Sunday (that’s a huge stretch). But the population is over 32,000, so that means there are 23,000 people on any given weekend who are not connected to a church family. Our work is cut out for us. Let’s get after it!