A Problem with Church Dashboards
No congregation is fully itself on any given Sunday. In some ways each week is exceptional. We see this most fully (and somewhat painfully) when visitors come and the organist is out sick and half the choir must have stayed up late watching a football game or when visitors decide to come on Trinity Sunday, when the seminarian the Rector arranged to preach decides to actually explain the divine nature of the Godhead clearly and distinctly, and so, somewhate hertically.
Last week, I shared the experiment in accountability taking place in the United Methodist Church’s North Alabama Conference. There, Bishop Will Willimon has each congregation reported key statistics every week and sharing them on the conference website.
Most clergy already have enough trouble with judging too much of their effectiveness in ministry by how the previous Snday went. The priest is full of self-confidence after a particularly good attendance Sunday where the sermon seemed to reasonate with the gathered flock only to drop the next week after a low attendance on a week when everything seemed to come together, but fewer than usual were there to join in worship. 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.
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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. I will take this up in next week’s Loose Canon.
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue
Canon to the Ordinary
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