A Few Statistics
The following table shows the number of assemblies listed in the Walterick Address Books for several different years.
Number of Assemblies Listed
|
Year |
U.S. |
Canada |
Total |
|
1941 |
529 |
274 |
803 |
|
1962 |
683 |
354 |
1037 |
|
1973 |
716 |
392 |
1108 |
|
1977 |
744 |
395 |
1139 |
|
1987 |
820 |
431 |
1251 |
|
1991 |
831 |
422 |
1253 |
|
1995 |
847 |
426 |
1273 |
|
1998 |
848 |
428 |
1276 |
|
1999 |
845 |
418 |
1263 |
The Walterick Address Books do not claim to have a complete listing of assemblies. Some assemblies do not respond to their requests for information and are eventually removed from the listing. It is often difficult to know of the existence of a new assembly. Thus, some new as well as existing assemblies are not included. For the same reason, some assemblies which have disbanded continue to appear in the listings. However, the year-by-year reporting to Walterick should be fairly consistent, and the results show a steady, if not large, growth in the number of assemblies from 1941 to the 1990s, with an apparent leveling in the past decade.
The booklet entitled African-American and Caribbean-American Assemblies in the United States, 1999 edition, compiled by International Christian Ministries, lists 83 assemblies, of which 18 are not found in the 1999 Walterick Address Book. All of these were contacted by me for information to be used in this book.
A comparison of the Walterick numbers with numbers from the booklet Canadian Links, Local Churches, October 1995, published by MSC Canada, numbers obtained from various issues of Letters of Interest, along with the above-mentioned African-American and Caribbean-American Assemblies in the United States, 1999 edition, suggests that the Walterick lists may be under-reporting the number of assemblies by about 5% to 10%.
From the responses received in producing this book, the number of assemblies started in the past two decades is shown in the following table.
New Assemblies Begun in:
|
Decade |
U.S. |
Canada |
|
1980s |
64 |
39 |
|
1990s |
52 |
14 |
The actual number of new assemblies will be higher than these numbers show. The numbers given in the table do not include the merging of existing assemblies or the moving of an assembly into a new building.