Problems with Church Statistics (and what to do)
Part of my job for the Diocese is to review annual Parochial Reports, comparing them to previous years. This is a charge that comes from the denomination as someone in each Diocese is to look over the data before approving it for The Episcopal Church as part of churchwide statistics. This means I spend a lot of time with the data and so know perhaps better than anyone in the Diocese how watching data can hurt as well as help.
Most clergy already struggle with judging too much of their effectiveness in ministry by how the previous Sunday went. Trust me, your priest is likely to be full of self-confidence after a particularly good attendance Sunday where the sermon seemed to resonate with the gathered flock. And likewise, her or his sense of how ministry is going can drop even the next week if there is low attendance, even (or maybe especially) when everything seemed to come together for the liturgy. This focus on the church’s numbers on a week by week basis is something to discourage in clergy and we certainly wouldn’t want that particular virus to spread to laity. After all, we are about the work of being the Body of Christ and that is something that slips through the cracks of a system that focuses on numbers as if these are the only measure of faithfulness to the Gospel.
Why Average Attendance Misses the Mark
This is especially true as the key statistic of Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) becomes less and less meaningful. Created in response to the problems of only tracking church membership, the ASA became across the 1980s and 90s a way effectiveness was judged. While better than speaking of members, the problem with tracking Sunday attendance is that more and more families consider themselves all in as church members without attending every week. So the ASA is getting more and more disconnected from how many people truly find their spiritual home with your congregation.
That said, it is not that numbers of any kind are of no help. After all, Jesus taught that we are to bear fruit and we do know that there are indicators of this to which we should be attentive. So we need to find a middle path between the fallen example of the priest who views her or his effectiveness in ministry by last Sunday’s attendance and offerings and the opposite extreme of paying no attention to numbers as if there is no possible way of measuring the fruit of ministry.
This middle path is to track trends over time and to do so using both the metrics of The Episcopal Church’s Parochial Report and some indicators that never appear on any denomination’s annual accounting. To counter this problem, while using various indicators to keep an eye on the fruit being born by the ministry of your church, I recommend tracking trends as follows:
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In specific, I recommend that you pay no attention to any given week of data. No church is fully itself on any Sunday and so you shouldn’t get excited about a week of atypically high attendance or offerings, or even two of these in a row. Similarly, you should not concern yourself with one or two low weeks in giving, or attendance, or whatever else you are tracking. Instead use the trendline option in your spreadseet program (you do keep up with all your key data in Excel or other similar program, right?) to track quarterly and semi-annual trends. These flatten out given Sundays, but still provide an ongoing look at how the ministry is doing in some objective ways. To do this, select trendline, then creating a rolling average across 12 weeks and 26 weeks (shown as the black line in the chart above). When these trends show rising or falling, there is more significance to the data. The trends will still rise with Easter and fall in the summer, but quite gently and the picture they create over time is all the more telling.
Tracking More Trends
Now that you are tracking trends, don’t stop with Average Sunday Attendance and weekly offering, but add the indicators significant to showing the difference your congregation is making. For a church with a feeding program, you can track both meals served and hours of service by volunteers. You can track mid-week participation in all of the church’s activities. The possibilities go on and on and I don’t want to get you so lost in a sea of numbers that you fail to share the love of God with those both in your chuch and those who will likely never darken its doors. Numbers alone will never show vitality. However, numbers do matter as we find that typically when we are faithful, that shows in some ways.
Beyond Means of Quantifying
The ways most significant to a pastor’s heart will never find a box in a spreadsheet, for their is no real way to numerically track lives changed for the better by the Gospel. The hospital visits that went well and led not to the hoped-for physical healing, but did lead to a person at peace with his or her death and a family gathered lovingly around for that time, will completely elude this tracking of trends. But don’t let these gloriously significant moments which delight the heart of God prevent you from keeping watch over the trends of the congregation where you serve as vestry, vicar or rector.
The Rev. Frank Logue, Canon to the Ordinary
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