Herding cats and counting sheep

Whilst away Church of England attendance figures for the year were released, triggering the usual ritual Groundhog Day for terminal decline, renaissance, or business as usual, depending almost entirely on the prejudices and agendas of the people doing the prognosticating. It doesn't seem to matter much what they actually say. Everybody, of course, is abslutely right from their own point of view, especially when it’s buttressed by hard figures.

As it happens, however, yesterday Kevin Ryan, diocesan ICT manager came yesterday to explain to Bucks area deans and lay chairs the use of Tableau, a new statistical tool we are making available for deanery planning. This enables people to drill down easily into local statitsics. As well as Kevin, we were lucky that one of our lay chairs is a professional in the field of marketing statistics, and was able to correct many basic errors of perception and interpretation among our group of 21 people. From this exercise we learn a few home truths:

1. The interpretation of statistics for serious marketing purposes is a fne art. What you are looking for affects what you find, and all kinds of allowances have to be made, with local knowledge, before you can arrive at a real answer to pretty much any particular question. It can be done, but not without a lot of work and qualification. Look at two examples from Bucks of explosive growth, more than doubling numbers over five years. One is caused by the fact that it is a reopened former redundant church near new housing.The other is caused by significant Evanglism more than doubling the size of an already large congregsation in five years. Make what you will of either, but to make sense of data you need to consider contextual and local realities.
   
   
2. Figures usually look enticingly accurate and absolute simply because they are figures, and only very occasionally because of the precision with which they describe particular realities. Go to any school governors' meeting in the league tables season, and you'll see what I mean.
   
   
3. Everything depends on the accuracy of the data that went in to begin with. Church statistics, especially attendance ones go through three significantly wobbly layers of filtration which cannot be avoided... starting with the fact that they are collected largely by volunteers.
   
   
4. Level 1: One is the significant differences in counting methods and consistency, which vary from never to regular, as well as from scrupulous to megasloppy. When I was an incumbent I once took a Sunday out to check our numbers. I physically counted 242 people on the premises. The number in the book was 127. This led to two significant discoveries about my parish. (a) the greatest variable factor was usually, in fact, which verger had done the counting. The more otpimistic ones tended to count higher, the more pessimistic lower, and some always the same kind of figure by a process of dead reckoning whereby they would go to the vestry, check the figure they'd put in last time, ask themselves whether the service felt fuller or not this week, and then stick something in the book. I’m not proud of this doscovery, but it was the way I discovered things were generally done. Accuracy was higher for smaller services simply because it was very much easier to count 16 people at evensong than 242 at the main morning service.
   
   Level 2: To derive the usual Sunday attendance figures, you need to average four Sundays in October noting any exceptions (like, say a baptism in the main service). This, along with the mathematical abilities of clergy and wardens, reveals a cornucopia of results, some more compliant with the theory of how they should be collected than others.
   
   Level 3: Returns rates vary. Only one deanery out of ten had an almost complete dataset and for another it was almost non-existent. Those who want to count sheep need first to herd cats.
   
   
5. As a result of all these realities, the grossed up statistical picture may, surprisingly, be the most “accurate.” I don’t mean the figures are actually correct, they surely aren’t, but grossed out across a field through a few years, trends may well appear, with the inaccuracies cancelling each other out a bit. The big story seems to be one of significant and fundamental erosion in the nineties, and a generally flatlining pattern this century. It’s a good way of disappointing everyone with an axe to grind, but it seems to be the truth. It’s is probably the least promising straw from which to make bricks to load into coshes, but I'm sure noble attempts were made last week.
   
   
6. The best use of these figures is local, because that's where people have the contextual knowledge to make sense of them. Thus our use of Tableau.
   
   
7. These figures are like reported crime rates. Other oft-quoted data, for example, the English Church Census, is of the nature of the Home Office Crime Survey — the dataset behind it is very much more partial and any extrapolation from it very much more an expert game, like long range weather forecasting. Caveat Emptor.
   
   
8. The figures we drilled down into, with some degree of local knowledge, revealed a huge variation, from the kind of classic decline patterns Fleet Street assumes, which do exist occasionally, to a far more egneral static pattern, and one or two examples of swift decline or explosive growth. More growth than devcline among these last. There are a handful of Bucks Churches which have experienced the kind of growth where they have had to double up shifts to fit everybody in, and one deanery in which, across almost thirty parishes, numbers have more than doubled over the past five years. What are you likely to experience in any of our 288 places of worship in Bucks? If you really want to know you’ll just have to go and see...
   

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 2

Reflecting on our Area Deans and Lay Chairs residential, the thought was that we could go away and talk in the abstract about how to sustain the sacred centre. Alternatively, we could instead go and sustain our sacred centre, with three creative spiritual guides to accompany our group and catalyse thoughts and prayers in ways that would deepen our awareness of God in our lives. I reccomend this approach highly for tired churches and groups.

Our Second guide was Dani Muñoz-Treviño, a wondrfully gifted, creative and reflective priest. Dani has done a curacy at Hazlemere, and is just coming to the end of a time in Marlow, during which he has built an emergent congregation and led a number of arts projects and activities involving hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people. He’s off soon to create a new project in Andalusia, Los Olivos — a two hundred year old hacienda, set in thirteen acres of national park. This will be Spain’s first Christian Art and Spirituality Retreat Centre, opening in the autumn of 2010.

Dani took us through a journey together around the ways people engage with God in a time of change, accompanied by movie clips and community art. His presentation built, very much, on Ernesto’s in which we entered an Old Testament narrative at depth, connected with the soundtrack of our lives in Christ, then crystallised th learning into an image. There’s a sense in which this is an area where the first are last and the last first. Some well established churchgoers have real difficulty engaging with God through art and creativity, where people everyone might think of as being complete outsiders sometimes get it instinctively.

I was also struck by the way that high energy arts projects such as Dani has been encouraging in Marlow seem to generate the energy to sustain themselves in new ways, sometimes by the seat of their pants, but well enough to survive. This said something powerful to me about the possibiities if we think we are short of resources; one response is to go round weeping need until someone feels sorry for us and shells out. Another is to kindle more energy at the heart of the project, so that a kind of mutual firestorm develops between people who understand and feel passionate about it. If nobody’s passionate about it, this could be divine guidance to give it your best shot, then try another project. If people get passionate about it, energy and all kinds of resources seem to flow from that shared commitment.

That’s the theory, and the gubbins of getting Los Olivos up and running will certainly test the theory. If Art is many people’s route to spiritual awareness, what matters is to unlock that potential in everybody, churchgoer or not. Gospel, good news, in an age where so much popular imagiation is locked down by sterile rationalism and superficial manipulation, is partly about refreshing the whole culture by releasing imagination. The Church’s role is not primarily to dogmatise at people from its own little bubble, but to celebrate and share images and experiences that create openings to God for hearts and minds and free the Spirit...

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 1

What kind of business do we think we’re in? The Church’s business is as much to know God and enjoy him for ever, delighting in Scripture and prayer, as it is to undertake organisational and administrative indoor games. The latter matter too, but only in relation to the former, because if all we ever do in Church business meetings is secular Church business, we lose our capacity to do anything after a while.

Our first diocesan prioirity for next year is what we call “sustaining the sacred centre” — nourishing our roots of faith, cultivating our imagination and openness to God, using poetry, song and and art, and releasing creative energy that can only come from deep encounter. Therefore, recently, inspired and organised by Archdeacon Karen Gorham, we replaced a regular area deans/lay chairs business meeting with a day enneagram workshop together.

This revealed the extent to which we have gotten into the habit of trying to transact complex business together with a less than adequate understanding of each person’s God-given humanity to sustain our process. Getting to recognise, articulate and enjoy our differences and particularities has helped us forward immensely. Suddenly we found we could frame and reframe our business questions in appropriate personal as well as theoretical terms. Thus more productive gets done.

Building on Karen’s brilliant idea, therefore, we have just been away with 22 area deans and lay chairs to Glenfall House, Cheltenham, for a 24 hour residential. We took with us some resource clergy — Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga Steele, Dani Muñoz-Treviño, and Ian Adams. All content was fantastically rich, and I’ll try and get to blog all three, but I’ve just got space for one today. Twenty Four hours seemed like a much longer time (in a good way!), and we all left feeling energised and revitalised spiritually.

Ernesto serves in Milton Keynes, and is an artist and priest. He has developed a knack for leading others into biblical stories, especially from the Old Testament, to explore them and enjoy them, then open themselves to creative possibilities in them. We took two stories — Jacob’s Ladder and Jacob wrestling an angel. Interacting individually and together with the text, themes of Solidarity and Struggle began to emerge, and really got us humming as we began to recognise resonances in our own stories from which we identified songs from the backing track of our lives. Using this we tried to identify, personally, symbolic objects and experiences that seemed to capture what God was saying to us about faith as solidarity and struggle. Tim Norwood’s doodle, here, captured some of the images that were spelled out around the room b y the end of our time together.

This may sound slightly weird, but it really opened a lot of spiritual doors for our group. You just explore the text in its own terms, suspending the question “what does it mean?” until you have really interacted with the story at a deep level in its own terms, and played with it and entered into it emotionally and imaginatively. Then you identify a song from the backing track of your own life and experience, and see what images God opens in your mind in response.

For anyone wanting to try this kind of thing in the privacy of their own home, Ernesto has a new book out, Five Stones and a burnt Stick. This takes the reader imaginatively into the Moses story, exploring his intimacy God against the counterpoint of his relationship with his wife. It made me realise how rich the Biblical tradition is, especially once we release it from the tyranny of being rationalised off into abstract ideas, and just let the narrative work on us, like the people did who originally told these stories around iron age campfires...