(By Jerry Van Marter, Presbyterian News Service). The Presbyterian Church (USA) Research Services office rolled out a new website during the 2017 Big Tent that promises to make access to church statistical information more user-friendly than in the past.
The new website – church-trends.pcusa.org – replaces the old “10-Year Trends” website and Comparative Statistics report. “About three years ago we began asking what information people were seeking,” Research Services Associate Susan Barnett told a July 7 Big Tent workshop heavily populated with presbytery stated clerks and other statistics enthusiasts. “We’ve been working on this new website, which is still under construction, for about a year-and-a-half.”
The website breaks down the denomination’s statistical information by congregations, presbyteries and synods, with sections on the entire denomination, racial ethnic data and ministers. Each section is formatted almost identically for ease of comparison. Data is presented in both averages and in raw numbers.
Each category (congregations, presbyteries, synods) into eight categories:
- Overview
- Membership
- Financials
- Diversity
- Education
- Leadership
- Females
- Males
Information is presented in current year versus previous year statistics and a separate section showing five-year trends.
“Churches that don’t report (via the Annual Statistical Report) are not included in the new format,” said Deborah Coe, Coordinator of Research Services, noting that this is a change from past practice. “Previously, if a church didn’t report, we just carried forward their most recent report numbers.” The change produces a more statistically valid report, Coe said.
She also described some of the benefits of the new website for individual Presbyterians. For instance, Coe said, “Suppose a Presbyterian family moves to a new city and is looking for a church that has kids the same age. The new site enables them to look up churches in their new community and by looking under the “education” tab find churches with church school attendance that matches their kids ages.”
For more information about the new Church-Trends website and the resources available on it, contact Susan Barnett by email at Susan.Barnett@pcusa.org, or by phone at 502-569-5161.
—–
Jerry Van Marter is interim director of communications for the Office of the General Assembly.
4 Comments. Leave new
All data now seems to be tabular, not graphical. Removing the bar charts makes it harder to notice the decline. It used to really jump out at the reader.
If there is one aspect of the corporate behavior of the PCUSA that boarders on pathological obsession it is counting stuff, accounting for stuff, reporting numbers. Records keeping over time. It almost matches its pathological obsessions over race, gender, sex and tribal, identity subgroups. And when the PCUSA does count stuff, it is the usual categories of race, sex, tribal identity sub groupings, go figure.
One aspect though of the overall 5 year trends 2012-2017 is the dramatic drop in the exact groups and folks the PCUSA seems to obsess about the most from a Louisville perspective, African-American, Hispanic, and most troubling for the PCUSA. Millennial age groupings 20-45. It seems the more they pander, pontificate, bow, pay homage to some various demographic sub group , the more said groups flee the entity. They are not stupid and can smell out bogus policies when they see such.
In the rather smaller church I serve I just tell the Clerk to more or less ignore the annual 30 pages of statistical data the denomination always demands, we do not, nor will not count such, or divide God’s people into such specific grouping for the sake of some organizational obsession over such. When a past EP, we go though so many, from the Presbytery asked why we do not forward the data my reply arose from my background in clinical psychology. If you want a bad behavior to go away or stop, simply do not respond when it occurs, ignore such, do not reward such, and over time it goes away. I have used the same behavioral theory on my 4 year old grandson and a numbers obsessed denomination, the results so far have been the same.
My thought exactly when I read the original puff-piece. Anytime a failing organization trots out something as “new and improved,” or “user-friendly” I remember to apply a large dose of salt along with this epigram: “The more he talked of his honor, the faster I counted the silver.”
Of course the stats that matter the most are completely missing: Worship attendance and Baptisms.