It's that day again - and this year I will miss it as I'm off to Cambridge on an ecumencial mission to vist my URC sister and her children to deliver Christmas gifts.
Two years ago, we had an abnormal count becuase a couple of youngsters arrived to worship with us. Last year was abnormal because we had D+1 with us, distorting the attendance figure upwards. This year all three under 50's are absent, so it's as well they don't split the age groups that finely, and several others are away for 'turkey and tinsel' type things.
My former church secretary never did the head count, so he tells me, rather he decided what he thought was the average attendance and listed that. Last year D+1 decided to count the next week, becuase the joint service with us mucked up their claims of a higher attendance than their morning congregation got.
It makes me wonder just how meaningful anything that is deduced from these data might be. I can't help feeling that the day of head counting is pretty much over - rather than churches sending in abitrary or artificial figures based on one Sunday service a year, perhaps we should be looking at our mission and what that looks like..?
Comments
I've had the same discussion with our former church secretary this morning who's still doing this as no-one else has come forward to take his job. Another trend in Baptist life?
I suppose the old rationale for the census (apart from the fact that David got away with it without too many people being struck down as a result - and Caesar Augustus' head count actually seemed to help get the Messiah in the right place at the right time) was that we did it at the same time of year to compare like with like (like weighing yourself at the same time of the day and week to see whether you've really lost weight, or just haven't eaten breakfast yet). Also perhaps the decision to take this measurement at a time of year when everyone was in bed with colds or visiting far-flung relatives with Christmas gifts was deliberately to err on the side of 'prudence', rather than to encourage everyone to cheat.
I'm not a statistician and I bet that's another string to your already well-provided bow, but in the good old bad old days when everything was beautifully organised and every church was bursting at the seams, maybe nobody was tempted to bend things a little to make the numbers look better than they were, and thus any tendency to stretch things a little was evened out. Or are you going to tell me the good old days are just another result of relying on secondary sources and other unreliable bits of baptistanschlussgeschicht?
These days I tend to agree that the approaches secretaries and ex-es take (often for massaging reasons) seems to skew the thing too much or perhaps the national number crunchers (whom incidentally I have no wish to knock; well done good and faithful people!) have built in controls to allow for this very human tendency. But at least as a result of today's head count, we do know we've got less than 1 million British Baptists in all and more than two over the age of 7 with brown hair and a limp.
Any suggestions on how we audit mission rather than heads?
Or how to measure growth in grace?
Will the answer be numerical or not? Missiologists and statisticians, please elucidate.