By the Numbers

The March/April issue of Worldwide Challenge reports that the US Campus Ministry (of Campus Crusade) had 48,376 students involved for the 05-06 school year. It also says there are 4,133 staff.

A couple of things jumped out to me from these numbers. Fist - that is a lot of students and very encouraging. Praise God! In recent years Cru has been able to expand to locations that always seemed a bit out of our abilities. That is cool.

The second thing is that I think that staff number is a bit high. Bob Francis (national operations director) and I used to discuss how this number was determined. I think the more accurate tally is somewhere around 2,500 - but I must admit that Judy Nelson, editor or WWC, makes very few mistakes - so . . . .

The third thing that hits me is, that if these numbers are right, then Cru has a 1:12 student to staff ratio. If the number is 2,500 then the ratio is more like 1:20. Obviously this is not true on the ground and most of the movement sizes are considerably larger than this.

However, this may be a reflection of how bureaucratic we have become. Before we get to enamoured with the numbers, we must remember what Churchill said ("the only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself").