two items

Yes, you're right, there hasn't been a great deal appearing on this blog over the last week or so. However, I have all sorts of reasons/excuses for that, none of which I'm going to present...

Anyway, here are a couple of things worth noting that you may not have caught up with elsewhere.

Scottish Seeds in Antipodean Soil: the development of Presbyterian Worship in Aoteaora New Zealand, by Graham Redding (the most recent past-Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Aotearoa NZ). I read an earlier version of this recently...

Graham's paper sets our early colonial worship patterns in the context of the Reformation and Church of Scotland history and then explores worship trends in NZ Presbyterianism to the modern era. This work in progress is the first attempt by any within the Presbyterian Church to explore and map the contours of this fascinating topic at such depth.
Why, he asks, have Presbyterians in this country never had a service book like the Anglicans? Is there anything distinctive about worship in a Presbyterian church? Does it have any underlying convictions? In what ways has it evolved over the years? What are its major antecedents? What have been its main liturgical and theological influences? Which personalities have played a key role in its development?

The current Presbyterian Moderator, Peter Cheyne, notes that there is a wortwhile series on discipleship from George Barna available here in New Zealand. It's called Growing True Disciples of Jesus, and the details of price and where to get it are available on Peter's blog.

Before you quote statistics...

In a short piece on the Associated Baptist Press site, Roger Lovette (he's the chirpy looking chap on the right) talks about a group of 13 pastors of various ages who've all been dismissed from their churches.   In the middle of his article he writes: 

The best statistics tell us that 1,600 ministers are dismissed or forced to resign every month in America. Leadership magazine reported more than a decade ago that nearly 23 percent of all ministers will be forced out before their careers end -- and that 67 percent of those affected will face forced termination more than once. Various indicators suggest these percentages have continued to climb. The Barna Institute says that in the United States a pastor is forced out every six minutes.

I've posted on here before about the 'best statistic' above, except that when I last read it, it was 1,500 pastors burning out every month.  I guess someone has now concluded that since that stat is supposed to be a few years old, another 100 pastors needed to be added into the mix.  

In a month of 30 days there are 43,200 minutes.   Now if a pastor is forced out every six minutes, as Barna's figure is supposed to claim, in a month that's a total of 7,200 ministers leaving their churches.  Does something strike you as a little odd here?   Barna's figures are four and a half times more than the 'best statistics.'    

I keep reading about these 1500 or 1600 pastors doing something every month, and the more I read it the more irritated I get.   Use statistics by all means - I do it in my job all the time - but for goodness sake check your facts.   As Bradley Wright points out in his book, too many statistics are badly read, poorly reported, and go on to perform a statistogynistic (think misogynistic) role in life.  Let's start nipping the worst of them in the bud.  

Single people (not) at church

There's an interesting stat from a recent Barna report entitled, Who is Active in “Group” Expressions of Faith? Whether similar figures apply to NZ, I don't know, but it's a possibility.

• Religious activities are typically missing single adults, especially those who have never been married. Just less than half of Americans are unmarried. [see below] However, the Barna study found that two-thirds of those who attend church, participate in a small group and attend Sunday school are married.
Further, 69 percent of church volunteers are married.
Fewer than one-fifth of single adults who have never been married are involved in "group" faith experiences, with worship and volunteering the least likely to attract them.
Those participating in house churches, however, reflect a 50-50 split of married and unmarried.

The NZ Stats relating to marital status from the 2006 Census are as follows:

• 34.1 percent of people aged 15 years and over living in New Zealand have never married
• 48.6 percent are married,
  
• 17.4 percent are separated, divorced or widowed
  
  The other important stat in this are is that:
• 27.2 percent of people aged 15 years and over in New Zealand who have never been married live with a partner.

This last is a subgroup of the 'never married' category above. In effect, it says that more than a quarter of the people who have never married are not single, but living in a relationship. However, this still leaves just over 70% of the first group as single people.

To make it a little easier to grasp:
If 34 people out of a hundred have never been married, 9 will be living in a relationship, and 25 will be 'officially' single. Add these 25 to the 17 or so who are separated, divorced or widowed, and you have 42 people in a hundred who are effectively single.

Please tell me if I've got my maths wrong! :)

How do we find ways of encouraging single adults into the church scene without making them feel uncomfortable because of all the married people around them?

Bradley Wright

This morning I discovered Bradley Wright's blog, along with his recently published book (the official publishing date is July), called Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media.

Wright is a sociologist at the University of Connecticut. On his blog he likes to spend time digging into statistics to see if they say what we're told they say - in other words, he's a man after my own heart (a blogger and suspicious of how stats are often interpreted). It's not that he doesn't believe the stats; but he wants to make sure we're getting real information out of them, not false.

For instance, in a post he wrote late last year called The Creation of a Useful, but Inaccurate, Statistic he takes George Barna to task for 'proving' something from a very small sample (270 participants) and from questions that were ambiguous to say the least. This is typical of Wright's approach, and typical of the information in his book too, by the sound of it.

I think Barna does a pretty good job overall, but I do question some of his polls and surveys. Having taken part in a good number of surveys myself over the years, and having had to put more than one together, I know how easy it is for the wrong questions to be asked - with the result that the wrong answers get recorded, and misinformation arises.

I'm going to be adding Wright to my list of blogs needing to be read on a regular basis. When it comes to the world of stats, we need all the insight and clarity we can get.

Fatherlessness

From George Barna's research: One out of every three children born in the United States each year is born to an unmarried woman.

In a report entitled, How Externally Focused Churches Minister to Children, there's a section about Omar Reyes (pictured), Community Development Director at NorthWood Church, Keller, TX ;

Omar believes a majority of children aren’t dancing because they lack an important part of God’s design for families: fathers. “Statistics show that most social ills can be traced back to fatherlessness,” says Omar. According to the National Center for Fathering, when fathers are absent, children suffer. Fatherlessness is linked to poverty, high school dropout rates, crime, adolescent drug use and teenage pregnancy. These problems have become systemic as one generation experiences and then passes on the legacy of fatherlessness.

Armed with that information and through studying the Bible, Omar says he began to understand the problem of fatherlessness as a spiritual need as well as a social problem. He learned part of this lesson while preaching in a Belize prison to young black men. “I was preaching to them about the father God and the love of the father. God just stopped me there in the middle of my talk and helped me realize that they did not understand what I was saying about fathers. They did not connect with the message because they did not understand what a father is.” Instead of continuing to preach, Omar asked the young men how many of them knew their fathers and how many had bad experiences with their fathers? “Ninety-five percent raised their hands to bad experiences,” he says.

Omar began to wonder how God can reveal himself when children aren’t exposed to positive
fathering. “What God showed me is that he wants us (Christians) to express the heart of the father to kids.” How can the church take on that kind of role and responsibility? Omar believes it begins very simply. “How do my own kids know that I am their dad? I feed them; I clothe them; I take care of them. The physical aspect of this is very important. I realized that as we provide for the physical need of children, they understand God as father. That will impact them forever,” he says.

Barna agrees. He writes, “Fostering spiritual transformation demands that we do our best to eliminate some of the emotional and behavioral obstacles to growth. If children are consumed by fears and worries regarding safety and capacity, little growth can occur.”

Getting the stats right...?

If you look on the Net for the phrase, 1500 ministers leave the ministry every month, you'll find result after result saying that this is a sad statistic and what can be done about it. (This is a US stat, of course.)

The other stat that seems to go along with it says 7000 churches close each year.

The only problem is, no one seems able to quote where these stats come from.

They're ascribed variously to George Barna and co, or Focus on the Family, in the latter case dating back to 1998. According to a rough calculation this would mean 18,000 ministers were leaving the ministry every year, and, if the 1998 figure is correct, 216,000 ministers would now be ex-ministers. 84,000 churches would now have closed. (Though in some versions of the stats, 4,000 churches open each year!)

Can these figures really be true?

I would dearly like to see the original figures, find out who they came from and what they were based on. In the meantime, this post will no doubt add to the search results on Google, almost all of which assume without any reference that these stats are correct.

Update...check out the comment from the Barna Group that appeared after this was posted yesterday.

Wellness....or not

These figures were quoted in a review on Amazon.com for the book, Mad Church Disease
Some recent statistics from The Fuller Institute, George Barna, and Pastoral Care Inc.

90% of the pastors report working between 55 to 75 hours per week.

80% believe pastoral ministry has negatively affected their families. Many pastor's children do not attend church now because of what the church has done to their parents.

33% state that being in the ministry is an outright hazard to their family.

90% feel they are inadequately trained to cope with the ministry demands and 50% feel unable to meet the demands of the job.

70% say they have a lower self-image now than when they first started.

70% do not have someone they consider a close friend.

40% report serious conflict with a parishioner at least once a month.

33% confess having involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with someone in the church .

50% have considered leaving the ministry in the last months.

50% of the ministers starting out will not last 5 years.

94% of clergy families feel the pressures of the pastor's ministry.

The profession of "Pastor" is near the bottom of a survey of the most-respected professions, just above "car salesman".

Over 4,000 churches closed in America last year.

Over 1,700 pastors left the ministry every month last year.

Over 1,300 pastors were terminated by the local church each month, many without cause.

Over 3,500 people a day left the church last year, over 1.25 million people.

This shows that there's all the more need for an emphasis on Wellness amongst ministers and their families. If it's happening there, it's happening here (in fact we know it's happening here).

That Mosaic Generation

The Barna Group has recently published the results of their ongoing research into the biblical worldviews of young American adults - the Mosaics, as the Barna Group calls them.
Though the results have not changed substantially for better or worse since the last poll four years ago, they are not particularly encouraging amongst the 'born-again' component of the survey, who appear to be almost as prone to believing what they prefer to believe as the non-born-again component.

The Barna Group notes:

Varying numbers of Americans embrace the different aspects of biblical worldview thinking. The survey found that:

• One-third of all adults (34%) believe that moral truth is absolute and unaffected by the circumstances. Slightly less than half of the born again adults (46%) believe in absolute moral truth.

• Half of all adults firmly believe that the Bible is accurate in all the principles it teaches. That proportion includes the four-fifths of born again adults (79%) who concur.

• Just one-quarter of adults (27%) are convinced that Satan is a real force. Even a minority of born again adults (40%) adopt that perspective.

• Similarly, only one-quarter of adults (28%) believe that it is impossible for someone to earn their way into Heaven through good behavior. Not quite half of all born again Christians (47%) strongly reject the notion of earning salvation through their deeds.

• A minority of American adults (40%) are persuaded that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life while He was on earth. Slightly less than two-thirds of the born again segment (62%) strongly believes that He was sinless.

• Seven out of ten adults (70%) say that God is the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe who still rules it today. That includes the 93% of born again adults who hold that conviction.

Technology and the Generation Gap

"Technology is fast becoming the latest driving force behind what is often called the 'generation gap,'" reports The Barna Group in its latest update. "Technology is shaping different experiences and expectations among generations."

My comment: I think when Barna talks about generations here, he isn't meaning parents and children, but successive groups of young people who may not be far apart in age. (My comments continue in italics below.)

While all generations benefit from the advances in technology, Barna found that "each successive generation is adopting and using technology at a significantly greater pace than their predecessors." The reliance on digital tools is exponentially greater among those under age 25. Another characteristic of the younger generations is what Barna calls "gadget lust" — 22 percent say they consider owning the latest technology to be a very high priority in life, compared to 9 percent of those over the age of 25.

Amongst the conclusions the researchers made are:

• Every age segment is becoming dependent on the Internet. (And that presumably includes seniors - over 60s)
  
• The nation's youngest adults (called Mosaics) are light-years ahead in their personal integration of these technologies. Supposedly the Barna group coined the term Mosaics; I'm not sure that it's used widely outside their perspective.
  
• All Americans (we could replace 'Americans' with 'New Zealanders') are increasingly dependent on new digital technologies to acquire entertainment, products, content, information and stimulation. All might be rather overstating the case; there are presumably a lot of people who don't have access to all technology.
  
• Churches have to work hard to keep pace with the way people access and use content, while also instructing churchgoers on the potency of electronic tools and techniques. Only a minority of churchgoing Mosaics and Busters are accessing their congregation's podcasts and Web sites. The reasons for this will be many and various: check out Lynne Baab's book, Reaching Out in a Networked World for more on this subject.
  
• Many of the same age-old questions about human development and human flourishing are taking on a new dimension. How does technology help or hinder communication and relationships between generations? How does it impact social skills, reading skills, writing skills, etc.? How will it affect tomorrow's workforce? [Barna] - And we might ask, how will affect the way people preach, or don't preach, in the future?

Thanks to the Pastors' Weekly Briefing for the original material.

Jones' Top Five

Back at the beginning of June, ex-pat Kiwi, Andrew Jones, who hosts the Tall Skinny Kiwi blog, wrote a list of five books that he regards as the top five for reporters, writers and researchers investigating ,or interested in, the Emerging Church movement. For his comments on these, check out the relevant post.

1. Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures, by Ryan Bolger and Eddie Gibbs.
2. The New Conspirators, Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time, by Tom Sine.
3. The Emerging Church, by Dan Kimball.
4. The Church on the Other Side, by Brian McLaren,
and several contenders for 5th place:
The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, by Tony Jones
Revolution, by George Barna
The Irresistible Revolution, by Shane Claibourne
The Great Emergence, by Phyllis Tickle
The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community: by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay.

An interesting bunch. They won't all appeal, and you'll have varying views on some of the approaches, but at least one or two of the top four are worth a look if you haven't already come across them.