In short
I'm Eric Love from Adelaide, a Christian keen to participate in the Church's mission and a nerd with skill & interest in software, geography, statistics, big-picture thinking etc. Over the years I have:
- been a go-to person for church leaders in SA interested in statistics
- developed Mappage, a web app to help me analyse and display statistics
- looked at the geographical distribution of Christians relative to the overall population in Adelaide or Australia
- considered strategic implications
- advocated for more Christians to live in areas of greater need
In 2019-20 I went into more depth in this. In 2020-21 I was a research assistant for a project on intercultural ministry for Uniting Church SA. In 2023 I'm doing another rewrite of my main articles.
Key ideas
As a Christian in the Aussie intellectual evangelical tradition, I'm coming with some assumptions: Firstly, the big deal is the good news that by Jesus Christ we can get right with God. The Church has the important mission of sharing this gospel with the whole world. Along with this, all the instruction that comes through the bible (including a fair bit about money). That said, here are three ideas that have grabbed me over the years.
The Church is stronger in some demographics than others and stronger in some places than others (the latter partly due to the former), and that really ought to inform our mission.
I wanted to find out as much as possible the facts & figures regarding relative strength of the Church across geography. This could better inform the Church, and I thought I was a good person to be doing this, with my ability & interest in numbers, maps and software.
I also felt, regardless of the above, that ordinary rich Christians ought to move down the ladder, living on less, giving away more, connecting more with people further down the ladder. I thought there would be multiple ways this would advance the gospel as well as being the right thing to do.