Ecclesiastical Statistical Style Guide
I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was about 30 years old, had been a senior pastor for 3 years, and God was doing good things in our ministry.
I was asked to preach at what would be the largest gathering of people that I had ever been in front of. It was for a “plenary session” (the big gathering, not a breakout classroom) at our denominational conference in Honolulu, Hawaii (just us pastors suffering for Jesus!).
These were the days in Christendom when the preachers sat on the platform, often in high back chairs, looking out into the congregation. Ah, ol’ school Pentecostal church services! During worship my wife and I stood there alongside a few denominational officials. I would have liked to have been in a less conspicuous place, so I could review my notes and get my bearings, but alas.
During worship the organizer of that particular service kept whispering to me instructions. Every few minutes he would tell me that my speaking time was being shortened. “Hey, John, you were given 20 minutes to share your message, but it’s being cut to 15 now.” Then a little bit later, “You’ve got 11 minutes to say what you’re gonna say.” Then again, “Hey, just letting you know you have 8 minutes. Don’t worry, it’s gonna be great!” All of this was transpiring in real time in front of a couple thousand people.
I blame the worship team.
Then, this happened…as the last song was concluding, the leader leaned over to me, and asked me two questions. First, he asked me to pronounce my last name. “It’s Fehlen. Sounds like “failing,” I said. And then, he asked me how many people were at church on Easter, which had been only two days prior. I quickly recalled our Resurrection Sunday attendance and told him, “Just over 500 people.” The song concluded, he stepped to the microphone, and proceeded to introduce, “John Failing, who has an incredible church that is running over 500 people every week. Welcome him as he comes!”
I was dumbfounded. I stepped to the microphone, took a breath, and looked at the applauding crowd. The first people I saw in the middle section were my closest friends that knew me very well, and also knew that our church was nowhere near 500 people. They glared at me, shaking their heads from side to side, visibly expressing their their distain for what they deemed to be a blatant lie on my behalf.
You see, attendance usually increases on Easter (that’s what we hope for, at least). Normally our church would have an attendance of less than half, say around 200-ish. I had to correct the misinformation, and I had to use precious time from my 8 minutes to do so!
This was an eccessiastical case of spouting off “anecdotal evidence” (Chivers, chapter 2). As well, it rubbed up against the question Chivers asked in chapter 9, “Is That a Big Number?” You see, the majority of Foursquare Churches have an average attendance of less than 75 people. The convention host could have introduced me as having 200 people in average attendance and it still would have been a “big deal!” Instead, he went for the “wow factor” of Easter, and had my closet friends and wife not been in the convention center, I might have let that particular ego boost slide right on by.
This would not be the last time I would be stymied by numerical data at church. You see, counting people goes back a long way. A saying that had taken on an almost biblical proportions for me was “We count people because people count to God.” Inherently I don’t disagree that people matter the Lord. Of course they do. But am I supposed to be compulsive about counting them, because of that, or are there other potentially dubious motives afoot?
A number of years ago, with great passion, I told the church that we “would grow to be a congregation of 2500 by next year.” Chivers touched on this in Chapter 17 on forecasting. At the time we were approximately 1200. We did not grow to 2500, we actually shrunk in size. But we (OK, me) tried to figure out how to express the numbers in such a way that it didn’t look like we were shrinking. Chivers spotlighted the “Goodhart’s Law” in which the measure becomes the target, and therefore is no longer a good measure. “What it means it that whatever metrics you use to assess how well you are doing at something, people will game those metrics” (Chivers, 158).
Guilty, as charged.
In 1 Chronicles 21, King David asked that his army be counted. It actually says that “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census…” (21:1). Obviously, God was not pleased with this decision. I was convicted by this passage of Scripture, and vowed to the Lord to be very careful in the future when it comes to numerical projections, and “pride-inflating” goal setting.
Little did I know that in the year 2020 until the present, I would have that inflated pride beat out of me. Enter COVID-19.
In chapter 12, Chivers asked the question “Has What We’re Measuring Changed?” Absolutely it has. In-person attendance. Online viewers. Are those unique IP addresses? Does each view represent one person or an average family attendance? Do we count Sunday streaming views, or On-Demand throughout the week?
And, what about in-person attenders? The average congregant now attends church an average of 1.4 times a month. If that is true, then perhaps a plateaued congregation, might be actually be growing. Food for thought.
Chivers says “Changes in how statistics are recorded can hugely affect the apparent trend in those statistics” (Chivers, 86). In my denomination there is one particular church that reports on average, over 5000 people. However, we know in actuality that the church is much, much smaller than that. Are they counting every person in the room, while doubling up on the worship and tech teams at multiple services? Are they including every person that watches online, and for all we know, every person that has ever walked by their church building, or lives within city limits, or has access to the internet?????
Who knows? The numbers are confusing at best, and deceiving at worst.
Perhaps we need an “Ecclesiastical Statistical Style Guide.” I would suggest a couple key points:
- Measure congregational engagement as much as attendance.
- Put less emphasis upon “Butts in the Seats and Bucks in the Offering” and more upon “Laughter in the Lobby and Serving in the Nursery.” Just saying.
- Easter is an anomaly, not the norm. Celebrate the people, but don’t elevate the pride.
- In the future, John Failing (Fehlen) needs more than 8 measly minutes to say just about anything!
About the Author
John Fehlen
John Fehlen is currently the Lead Pastor of West Salem Foursquare Church. Prior to that he served at churches in Washington and California. A graduate of Life Pacific University in San Dimas, CA in Pastoral Ministry, and Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, CA with a Masters in Leadership and Spirituality. He and his wife Denise have four grown children and four grandchildren. John is the author of "Don't Give Up: Encouragement for Weary Souls in Challenging Times," a book for pastoral leaders, a children's book called "The Way I See You," and the forthcoming "Leave A Mark: The Jouney of Intentional Parenting." You can connect with John on Instagram (@johnfehlen) as well as at johnfehlen.substack.com.12 responses to “Ecclesiastical Statistical Style Guide”
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Numbers, numbers, toil and trouble.
It seems to me that God has a propensity to shake up the numbers.
Judges 7:7 The Lord said to Gideon, “With the three hundred men that lapped I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands. Let all the others go home.” 8 So Gideon sent the rest of the Israelites home but kept the three hundred, who took over the provisions and trumpets of the others.
From 20,000 to 300. Ouch.
God’s math even changes the 1(man) + 1 (woman) = 1 (in flesh).
And three in one? Father, Spirit, Son!
God has his way with numbers. I guess when you create the universe you can manipulate them however you please. And yet, we humans are so focused on numbers as a measure of success.
Who said, “Figures lie, and Liars Figure?”
I am looking at numbers from UNCHR, Barna, Pew Research, Department of Homeland Security and the Customs Border Patrol. None of these numbers match, but I guess I did not expect them too.
However, these numbers are bantered about in the political debate on…(name your topic of choice). The elite of our land (the Congress) grabs data and hurls it at each other like cannon fire. Sigh.
Sadly, our US mission teams coming to Hungary and Slovakia always seemed to come with the hopes of a “heavenly tally” that they could take back in their report to their church. Double Sigh…
Numbers, Numbers, Toil and Trouble… Thanks for your comments…Shalom…Russ
Russell, I sense a degree of cynicism in your reply – not accusatory whatsoever, because I too can be cynical from time to time. I wonder if the way in which numbers are reported, manipulated, stretched and used for political fodder, brings us to that place of cynicism. I’m trying to discern my own heart in the matter, and why I get so flustered. How have you kept watch on your soul, in light of the various examples you gave in your reply? Appreciate it!
Hi John, For my NPO there are groups (shall we say political ones) that use the data for their own ends. It is my intent to present both teams (as it were) and the conclusions/interpretations that each group/party has settled on. This will represent the worldly response to legal immigration.
Part 2 – My prayer is that the CHURCH will respond in a biblical way to the call (Deut 10:18, Orphans, Widows, and ALIENS amongst us). My NPO will hopefully provide tool(s) that will enable the church to fulfill its biblical mandates rather an relying on party politics and the destructive polarization that it engenders.
A work in progress…thanks for asking.
Gideon also came to mind as I was reading this post!
To me, it begs a deeper question: What does what we measure say about what we value? And, what does what we value tell us about our culture?
I am not excusing your gaming the numbers (thank you for being honest, by the way) but I would guess that you were operating in a system that had communicated the importance of the numbers you were trying to game. This makes me wonder: what in your system is rewarding more of the “butts in seats” than “volunteers in the nursery?”
Years ago, Tony Campolo wrote a book, or gave a talk (I don’t remember exactly) called “Who Switched the Price Tags?” The idea was based on someone going around a store moving cheap price tags onto expensive items, and cheap stuff now costing a bunch. This was before electronic scanner QR code stuff, for sure. But the concept is that our world has placed value on that which is worthless, and devalued that which God esteems, and thereby so should we. Hollywood has this dialed in. What we pay professional sports players vs. teachers. The examples could go on and on. Churches often get sucked into the same game. You asked what in our system values that. Someone (I want to attribute it to Andy Stanley) once said “What gets celebrated, get’s repeated.” Attendance numbers and P&L statements tend to what is celebrated most often and most publicly. Perhaps addressing that is a good place to start.
I actually prefer a smaller congregation.
But, that’s beside the point.
The gaming of congregational numbers kills me. Our church does it especially with our online service. Supposedly we get something like “500 viewers” each Sunday. I’m always skeptical. How many of those “viewer” were accidental clicks or 5 second clicks or they turned it on and then walked away? I’m not buying that 500 people actually watched our church service online. But it makes us look good.
Same goes with congregational numbers. We haven’t purged the rolls in years so we look like a much bigger congregation than we actually are. Part of the reason we don’t purge them is because of the amount of time and work it would take to do so – and I get that.
In any case, churches are notorious for using Goodhart’s Law! Like you said though, the pandemic is beating that out of us!
I think that at the core is the great desire to be on a “winning team.” We want to be a part of something growing, rather than the inverse, ahem…dying. So we tend to hitch our horses to winning athletic organizations, artists on the rise, pastors with book deals, and churches that “stack ’em in.”
You used the word “purge” a few times in your post – that might be a good thing. The Bible would call it “prune” – but the process is about the same, and hopefully the “fruit that remains” is better than before. 🙂
John, as one of those friends sitting in the front row of convention giving you stink-eye 21 years ago, I’ll say that our denomination (and probably most denominations) still struggle with measuring the wrong things or giving the wrong weight to the things we do measure.
You and I have had the conversation that some of the best most effective pastors we know are pastoring churches of under 100 people. And that some of the most impacting churches out there in terms of leadership development and deployment will never be known because they aren’t “mega”.
You suggest measuring congregational engagement rather than attendance. How would you go about measuring engagement, and is that something you are actively doing or are planning to do? (if so, how?) Also, are you suggesting not measuring attendance (the ‘rather than’ statement) or did you mean to say something like “as much as”?
Yes, Tim, our lives have been intersecting for decades now. It’s just a matter of time before we say pretty much the same thing in one of our blogs or title it the same. Our wives do concur that “we share one brain.”
Your suggestion of “as much as” in lieu of “rather than” is spot on. Absolutely. That’s what I’m getting at. To be fair, I was utilizing a bit of “tongue in cheek” with that Ecclesiastical Statistical Style Guide. However, if I were to earnestly try to develop a metric such as this I would definitely have to wrestle with emotive terms such as “engagement,” “joy, laughter,” etc. But that sure would be interesting!
I love that you go directly to “engagement, joy laughter”. It’s like though we know it’s impossible to measure those things well (maybe engagement is a bit doable?) we know in our knowers that those are much better indicators of health and life than attendance, money, programs, etc.
Great posts John, love the honesty. While I was a youth pastor a fellow veteran youth worker told me to take whatever number another youth pastor gives of their youth group size, subtract 10! They say they are running 50 kids, probably 40 consistently. lol Seems to be the same principle with adult congregations.
When I went to a Summit Leadership conference in Oklahoma, we got to meet other pastors around the country. Number one question. How big is your congregation?! That metric is baked into religious culture to measure a person or churches value and worth which I think needs to shift. Love your “Ecclesiastical Statistical Style Guide”!
I like your writing, John!
After your experience at the service, how do you view attendance figures concerning the progress of a church? Should a church strive for only large numbers, or is it important to pay attention to even smaller gatherings of 2-3 people present in God’s name?