MINISTERS MATTER

FINAL SUMMARY #10

WHO IS BRADLEY WRIGHT?

An associate professor at the University of Connecticut where I study the sociology of Christianity. I am Christian, a husband and father, and someone who adores goofing around. Hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

http://brewright.blogspot.com/

 I would summarize this series on Willow Creek’s Reveal study with four points.

1) Well done. Collecting survey data is a powerful but virtually unused tool in the world of Christian churches. By conducting Reveal, Willow Creek has modeled to other churches the usefulness of church surveys, and given Willow’s influence in American Christendom, I would hope that this message takes hold.

2) Weaknesses. As with any survey, Reveal has its weaknesses. The cross-sectional design of its sample (i.e., a one-time snapshot) limits the conclusions that can be drawn from the data. Also, the authors use of “maximizing predictability,” a technique apparently popular in brand marketing studies, doesn’t fit well with studies of human behavior. Reveal constitutes a good pilot study that should prepare the way for more definitive studies in the future.

3) Overinterpretation of the data. The conclusion draw by the study’s authors, and loudly echoed by critics of Willow Creek, is that the Willow model is flawed. The data presented here are sufficiently ambiguous to make such strong claims. Given the weaknesses of the study design and analytic strategy, it’s possible that the results indicate strong support for the Willow Creek model.

4) Future studies. Simply repeating the Reveal study with hundreds more churches potentially adds very little knowledge. Much better would be a smaller, longitudinal study of, say, a thousand respondents. If many churches are studied, measure characteristics of the churches as a whole as well as of individuals.

I hope that this series has been helpful to the authors and readers of Reveal. In academics, critical attention is a form of flattery indicating that the discussed work —it indicates that one thinks a work is worth consideration. I believe that Reveal will be looked back upon as an important step in the American Christian Church discovering the value of empirical data.

At Mission O, Ministers Matter!

SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH #9

WHO IS BRADLEY WRIGHT?

An associate professor at the University of Connecticut where I study the sociology of Christianity. I am Christian, a husband and father, and someone who adores goofing around. Hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

http://brewright.blogspot.com/

The Reveal Study, conducted by Willow Creek Church, used what sociologists call a cross-sectional survey to collect data at one point in time. Think of it as a snap-shot of life at Willow during the time of the survey.

A cross-sectional survey was a good choice to get the Reveal program going, for it is an inexpensive method to collect data, and it’s a good way to test measures and start exploring a phenomenon.

Cross-sectional surveys, however, have some inherent weaknesses.

They don’t do a good job in describing how processes work over time—think of trying to document a child’s growth by taking a picture at only one point in time. This matters because some of Reveal’s hypotheses are longitudinal—over time—in nature. One example is the idea that as Christians should act differently as they become more mature in their faith.

Another weakness with cross-sectional studies regards causality. When we want to say that “A” causes “B”, we usually assume that “A” precedes “B” in time (short of having a time machine). As such, we would like to measure “A” at an earlier time than “B” to lessen the chance of reverse causation—“B” causing “A.” (There’s more to establishing causality, but it’s not worth going into here).

It’s in this context that we might review Reveal’s plans for the future. As described in the book, the study’s authors plan to give the current Reveal study in 500 other churches. By doing this they could easily get up to 50,000 respondents (figuring 100 per church). The value of doing this is that they can replicate the Reveal study in other contexts, other than just Willow (and the other six churches surveyed originally). This should broaden the generalizability of the findings (something sociologists call external validity).

Nonetheless, this next phase of Reveal isn’t necessarily a big step forward for two reasons. 1) It is still saddled with the limitations of cross-sectional studies, and 2) the extra sample size by itself doesn’t make much of a difference. The value of having bigger samples is that they give more certainty in the accuracy of the resulting statistics (called statistical power). However, for a study like this, a sample of several thousand is more than enough, and the additional tens of thousands of respondents won’t really make much a difference. It doesn’t make things worse, but it doesn’t much increase the validity of the data.

What then would I recommend for Reveal?

Three things.

1) Consider conducting a longitudinal study.

The best way to test Reveal’s ideas would be to conduct a longitudinal study by observing some people over time. For example, recruit 1,000 people at Willow Creek. Some who are there for their first Sunday, some who have been there for years, and some in between. Collect information about them, such as is already collected in Reveal. Then wait six months to a year and collect the same information about them. Maybe wait another time period and do it again. At the end, you’ll have data to test how people change over time in response to being at Willow Creek. You can test what stages people go through, and how they change with time in the church. These would be fascinating data, and I don’t know of any church that has collected them.

2) Collect church-level measures.

As I discuss above, the additional tens of thousands of respondents in the next phase of Reveal really don’t buy much in terms of statistical power. What would be useful, however, would be to collect data about the 500 churches themselves. Record data such as:

- how big is the church
- what size town is it in
- how many pastors do they have
- do they have a “seeker-sensitive” approach to ministry
- what is their budget
- what percentage of their leadership are women or racial minorities
- anything other church characteristic that might affect the individuals’ experiences at a church

With sufficient church-level measures, the Reveal authors could then conduct what is called a multi-level analysis. They could examine which individual characteristics make a difference versus which church characteristics.

The classic example of multi-level analysis comes from educational studies. If a child succeeds in education, it could be due to who they are as students—smart, hard working, high goals, etc. Success could also be due to the school they go to—low teacher/student ratio, highly educated and paid teachers, fellow students who are going to college, etc. Or, it could be both the child and the school.

Multi-level education studies pick a series of schools, measuring school characteristics, and then pick individual students within those schools, measuring individual characteristics. They then analyze these multi-level data using various statistical techniques (such as “hierarchical linear modeling”).

The result: A reasonably clear statement about whether it’s the person, the organization, or both that affect individual outcomes.

3) Draw from social science.

The analytic approach used in Reveal comes from business marketing studies, and this poses some problems when applied to people, for people are a more complex unit of study than most business products.

Consider studying perfume sales at a department store versus people’s behavior. A bottle of perfume won’t up and leave by itself if it doesn’t like where it is placed. People will change due to situations if they are unhappy. A bottle of perfume won’t be different if it is surrounded by other bottles of perfume. People are different depending on who’s around them. The actual contents of a perfume bottle don’t change depending on what people think of it. People do change based on other peoples’ opinions.

As described in Reveal, the driving analytic strategy in marketing/ business studies is “maximizing predictability.” This means identifying which predictor variables best predict the outcome variable (it’s also called “maximizing explained variance”). In sociology this is generally in sociology this is considered a not a good idea when it comes to people, for it capitalizes on chance, potentially amplifies measurement and sampling error, and produces less interesting results.

There are plenty of social scientists who apply the latest statistical and sampling methods in applying religious behaviors, and Willow Creek should get some of these people are board. To see the difference between a social science approach and the marketing approach of Reveal, pick up any book by Christian Smith, a sociologist at Notre Dame. He’s about the best in the business when it comes to surveys about religion, and his work produces simple, clear, believable findings.

These three suggestions would substantially increase the power and importance of the Reveal study, helping it to further achieve its laudable goals of helping the church grow.

At Mission O, Ministers Matter!

STALLED BELIEVERS? #8

WHO IS BRADLEY WRIGHT?

An associate professor at the University of Connecticut where I study the sociology of Christianity. I am Christian, a husband and father, and someone who adores goofing around. Hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

http://brewright.blogspot.com/

I want to follow-up on yesterday’s post.

A key finding in Reveal is that a good portion (up to 25%) were mature believers who said that they were stalled in their spiritual walk. This has been used as an indictment of the Willow Creek , with its focus on bringing seekers into the church.

As we think more deeply about this finding, however, it may not be problematic for two reasons.

1) Is stalled bad? It’s my distinct impression that spiritual growth is not linear, rather it goes up in fits in starts: sudden increases followed by long plateaus.

This type of growth pattern would seem to fit better with most other areas of life as well, such as getting better at a sport, learning a hobby, growing together as a couple, and advancing in a career. Other than my gaining weight during the holidays, I can think of very little in my life that is truly linear.

In my own experience, the times of feeling stalled—being at a plateau—have in retrospect proven to be fruitful (as well as difficult). Part of the Christian walk, I think, is hanging on during these difficult times.

As such, the finding that some portion of the mature believers in Reveal report themselves as stalled may just reflect the realities of Christian life. My guess is that Mother Theresa, if she had taken the Reveal study, would have frequently placed herself into the “stalled” category (thanks Mat for this point).

I think that most Christians go through extended periods of feeling flat, and not only is the way it is, it might also be the way it should be.

2) Regression to the mean. A powerful but often overlooked statistical principle is that of “regression to the mean.” This principle states that whenever you measure a person or group of people with extreme scores on some scale, you can expect them, on average, to become less extreme—return toward the mean—over time. This is because extreme scores result from both stable and unstable characteristics, and the unstable change over time. To read more click here.

Here are some examples of regression to the mean:

- The college football season is about ready to end (sadly). We can be pretty sure that next season the top twenty teams of this season won’t do as well, and the bottom twenty teams will do better. They will regress to the mean.
- Very tall parents will usually have children who are shorter than they are, and very short parents will usually have children taller than they. (As trivia, the name given to “regression analysis” is based on this finding).
- The top mutual funds this year probably won’t perform as well next year, and the worst mutual funds will probably perform better (though maybe not well).

What does this mean for church surveys such as Reveal? We can almost always expect that a group of Christians who have done really well in the past will probably not do as well in the future, and the group who has done the worst will probably do better.

As such, church surveys will probably routinely find that the most active, mature members are getting worse, and the newest, least experienced members are overall getting better. If so, this may not be a flaw in ministry plans, but rather just a reflection of regression to the mean.

Does this mean that churches should not target special programs for mature, active believers? Of course not. Rather, an overall downward trend among those doing best can always be expected.

At Mission O, Ministers Matter!

OVER-INTERPRETING THE DATA #7

WHO IS BRADLEY WRIGHT?

An associate professor at the University of Connecticut where I study the sociology of Christianity. I am Christian, a husband and father, and someone who adores goofing around. Hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

http://brewright.blogspot.com/

n my last post, I discussed one of Reveal's two major criticisms of Willow Creek Church, a moderate relationship between church activities and spiritual growth. Here I discuss the second major criticism--that a significant minority of sample members described themselves as spiritually stagnant or were dissatisfied with their church. As shown in this figure, about 1/4 of the sample identified labeled themselves as either dissatisfied or stagnant.

This statistic highlights the problem posed by Reveal not having a comparison group, for we don't know if it's good or bad.

Let's say I told you that a sports player was successful at two-thirds of what they attempted, and then I asked you if this is good. Well, you would need to know how everyone else does. If it's free throws, this isn't very good. If it's completing passes, this is very good. If it's getting on base, it's the best ever.

It may be the nature of Christian life that 1/3 of the people are stalled or dissatisfied.

or

It may be that this number is high, suggesting that Willow needs to improve

or

It may be that this number is low, suggesting that Willow is doing a great job.

There's another wrinkle here: Church involvement is voluntary. So, why would a dissatisfied, stalled person be involved? It suggests that there may be other benefits or ties that come into play.

What if a church found that 100% of its attendees were satisfied and growing. Would this be good? Maybe but maybe not. What if the church didn't attract people unintentionally drove off or otherwise couldn't keep people who were having troubles or were unhappy? That would produce high satisfaction scores, but it might be missing the larger purpose of the Church.

In this sense, Willow might be commended for holding on to these people.

Again, it's not that Reveal did anything wrong in collecting these data or that it collected them badly. Rather, the concern here is over-interpretation. These data should suggest future work, but by themselves they are not sufficient to justify wide scale changes in an organization as successful as Willow Creek.

At Mission O, Ministers Matter!

IS THE WILLOW MODEL FLAWED? #6

WHO IS BRADLEY WRIGHT?

An associate professor at the University of Connecticut where I study the sociology of Christianity. I am Christian, a husband and father, and someone who adores goofing around. Hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

http://brewright.blogspot.com/

The big story to come out of Willow Creek's Reveal Study is that the seeker-sensitive ministry made famous by Willow is supposedly flawed and ineffective. This is based on two findings, the first of which I’ll post on today:

The first finding is that levels of participation in church activities didn't predict measures of spiritual growth. As shown in this graph, the relationship between church activity and spiritual growth appears modest at best.

These findings seem to have hit the leadership of Willow really hard. From the Christianity Today blog,

"Having spent thirty years creating and promoting a multi-million dollar organization driven by programs and measuring participation, and convincing other church leaders to do the same, you can see why Hybels called this research “the wake up call” of his life.
Hybels confesses:

'We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.'"

Critics of Willow have seized upon this admission to term the Willow as deeply flawed.

Is the Willow Creek actually flawed? Maybe, maybe not, but we can't tell from these data for several reasons.

1) How steep a line? As per the chart printed above, both spiritual behaviors increase somewhat with church activities while spiritual attitudes don’t really. The fact that increased church activity correlates with moderate growth is a good sign for Willow. Maybe it’s not as steep a line as they expected, but it’s still going up. They found a much steeper line using a spiritual continuum to predict spiritual growth, but as I posted previously, this may not be a particularly interesting finding. It could be that this is as big effect as can be realistically expected, which leads me to the second point.

2) Compared to what? To judge the effectiveness of any program, you need to compare it to something. For example, if we give a pill to people with some disease, and 25% of the pass away, does the pill work? The answer: We don’t know, and we have to ask what would have happened if they didn’t take the pill. There are several useful comparisons for a study such as Reveal. A) What would have happened to the people if they had not attended church activities? B) What would have happened if they had attended church activities elsewhere? C) What would have happened if they had attended a different level of church activities? The Reveal study ignores the first two comparisons and uses cross-sectional data to approximate the third one. This raises another issue…

3) Contamination. People talk to each other, they learn from each other. In a religious community such as Willow Creek, what is taught to one group of people affects others as well. As such, the impact of programs on high-activity people will probably be spread to low-activity people as well. This effect on low-activity people could change their behavior to make it more similar to the high-activity people, giving the false impression that the activities don’t actually work.

In reality, the ideas being tested here operate at the church-wide level, i.e., is Willow Creek effective as a church? To fully test this question, in turn, requires church level data. For example, find 100 churches, 50 that subscribe to the Willow Creek and 50 that don’t. How are they different? How are they the same? (Ideally you would randomly assign which churches get the Willow Creek but this gets difficult).

4) Activity and maturity. Another interpretation of these data goes as follows. Maybe the individuals who have recently started attending church, especially if they are new Christians, are also the most active in its activities. With time they grow spiritually, but they also settle down into a routine involving fewer activities. This would mask the correlation between church activity and spiritual growth, even if church activities were effective.

It appears that the Reveal Study is over-interpreting the data. The big changes apparently in place at Willow as the result of Reveal may in fact not be warranted. In short, they may be fixing something that isn’t broken.

Here’s an analogy. If someone feels a lump under their arm, they would be rightly concerned about the possibility of cancer. What they should not do, however, is immediately start full-scale cancer treatment such as chemotherapy. What they should do is get a better test, such as a biopsy, to find out if the lump is cancerous and then decide what to do—the lump may be something else.

The findings of the Reveal Study perhaps suggest problems with the Willow , but they may not. They are inherently limited by the cross-sectional design and other features of the study. A more careful look using a more powerful survey design is warranted before an institution as successful as Willow makes serious changes.

At Mission O, Ministers Matter!

THE PROBLEM OF PREDICTIVENESS #5

WHO IS BRADLEY WRIGHT?

An associate professor at the University of Connecticut where I study the sociology of Christianity. I am Christian, a husband and father, and someone who adores goofing around. Hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

http://brewright.blogspot.com/

The big message in the Reveal Study is that there is a spiritual continuum that predicts spiritual growth. As discussed in previous posts, the spiritual continuum is a four-stage scale of self-defined relationship with Christ, and spiritual growth is various behaviors and attitudes such as tithing, reading the Bible, praying, worshiping.

To make it easier to understand, I drew a picture. As shown below, the Reveal Study assumes the causal #1. The more you define yourself as close to Christ, the more you do Christian things.

The problem with this causal is that several other, equally viable ones exist. Maybe doing Christian things, like reading the Bible, make you feel closer to Christ (i.e., 2). Or, maybe one's self-defined relationship with Christ and one's spiritual practices are mutually interdependent (Model 3).

The that I find most compelling is #4. Various factors "X" affect both self-perceived relationship with Christ as well as spiritual practices. Obviously, from an applied perspective, churches should be looking for those "X"s that increase both.

It's not clear to me that separating "relationship with Christ (i.e., spiritual continuum) and spiritual growth gives us any particular insight, for I think they should be clumped together as outcome measures.

***** Warning: Somewhat technical language below. You can stop reading here and still get the main point of this post *****

The authors support the validity of their continuum -> growth by emphasizing its high predictive power. "Our research experts told us this was one of the most highly predictive s that they had seen (p. 36, emphasis theirs)." Predictive here means that levels of the "spiritual growth" systematically vary by levels of the spiritual continuum. As shown in various tables, the Reveal Study documents that people with higher scores on the continuum also score higher on measures of spiritual growth.

It's not that this statement is inaccurate, rather it's uninteresting.

If you have two measures of about the same thing, well of course they will be highly correlated and thus predictive of each other. Here are some everyday examples of this:

* What's a strong predictor of whether people smoke cigarettes today? If they smoked cigarettes yesterday.

* What's a strong predictor of running a mile fast? Being able to run two miles fast.

* What's a strong predictor of having an in-depth knowledge of the book of John? Knowing the books of Luke well.

Suppose that a church hired a consultant to help it increase the size of its congregation. The consultant came back saying that they the best predictor of church attendance in any given church is the number of cars in the parking lot during services, and so the church should focus on increasing them. My guess is that the church wouldn't necessarily find this help--it's accurate, but not very interesting.

They key in research is to examine the empirical connectedness (i.e., correlation) between variables that are somewhat different, that have an interesting and meaningful connection, if it exists. It's not clear to me that the Reveal study has done this in their emphasis on a spiritual continuum.

At Mission O, Ministers Matter!

MEASUREMENT ISSUES #4

WHO IS BRADLEY WRIGHT?

An associate professor at the University of Connecticut where I study the sociology of Christianity. I am Christian, a husband and father, and someone who adores goofing around. Hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

http://brewright.blogspot.com/

The big take-home message of the Reveal Study, according to its authors, is that church involvement doesn't predict spiritual growth but there is a spiritual continuum that does.

I'll write about the church involvement aspect of this statement in a later post, but here I want to focus on the spiritual continuum. This post discusses its measurement, and the next post in the series addresses causal issues.

From how the authors describe it, a spiritual continuum is a Guttman scale measuring self-defined relationship with Christ. It has four stages:

1) Exploring Christianity. "I believe in God, but I'm not sure about Christ. My faith is not a significant part of my life."

2) Growing in Christ. "I believe in Jesus, and I'm working on what it means to get to know Him."

3) Close to Christ. "I feel really close to Christ and depend on him daily for guidance."

4) Christ-Centered. "God is all that I need in my life. He is enough. Everything I do is a reflection of him."

If I understand it correctly, one can be in one category only, higher scores represent being further along the spiritual continuum, and people in higher stages are assumed to have passed through the lower stages.

Here are some problems with this measure:

* Sequential? It's not clear that these represent a linear (or at least sequential) trajectory of getting closer to Christ. For example, #3 and #4 both seem to represent mature Christian faith.

* Multiple categories. Some people would place themselves into multiple categories. In reading this, I am squarely in #2 and #3. I believe in Christ, feel close to him, am working to get to know him better, and depend on him daily for guidance.

* Mixed message. The #4 level is awkward for me because it implies a perfection that I'll certainly never experience... Is *everything* I do a reflection of Him? I certainly hope not (at least for His name). In fact, I would probably be suspicious of anyone who would agree with this sta

Now, it sounds like I'm being nit-picky about measurement, and, who knows, maybe I am. However, the authors put so much weight on this measure--suggesting that it be a (the?) primary principle of church growth, that it's worth reflecting on its quality.

These types of scales aren't used a lot any more in sociology, and for pretty good reasons. Some of the problems suggested above are typical of them.

I'm not sure that the idea of a four-stage continuum--as conceptualized here--maps on to the reality of Christian life.

At Mission O, Ministers Matter!

DIMENSIONS OF RELIGIOSITY #3

WHO IS BRADLEY WRIGHT?

An associate professor at the University of Connecticut where I study the sociology of Christianity. I am Christian, a husband and father, and someone who adores goofing around. Hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

http://brewright.blogspot.com/

In terms of what can be improved with the Reveal Study, I'm starting with what is ultimately an unfair question--unfair because I certainly don't know the answer, and they may not be a clear answer.

What should be the outcome variable of church surveys? That is, what's the end toward which all means aim to increase?

The Reveal Study uses individual "spiritual behaviors"--such as prayer, tithing, evangelism, and serving as well as "spiritual attitudes"--love for God and love for people. These are reasonable, for many Christians would argue against their importance, but there are other reasonable measures as well.

Sociologists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out which dimensions underly religiousness, and they have come up with a variety of answers. An early, classic statement about this comes from the work of Rodney Stark and Charles Glock who identified 8 dimensions of "religiosity." They are:

1) Experiential--feelings of having communed with God, having received revelation or direct experience with God.

2) Devotional--private devotion, private prayer.

3) Ritualistic--participation in group worship services and other activities

4) Belief--the extent to which the person believes in the theological beliefs of the group

5) Knowledge--the extent to which the person knows the believes and doctrine of the group.

6) Consequential--how people's lives--their attitudes and behaviors, are changed by their religious involvement.

7) Communal--one's social integration into the religious group, how many friends they have who are fellow believers.

8) Particularism--the degree to which the person believes that their faith is the true path to salvation.

The Reveal Study emphasizes the consequential dimension of religion--various attitudes and behaviors that should be changed by religion. (They are not entirely clear on how they constructed their outcome measure, so there may be more than that). They use the experiential dimension as a predictor (or independent variable) which they call a spiritual continuum.

This leaves significant aspects of the Christian walk not covered by the outcome measures employed by Reveal. Even with the consequential dimension, as Jerry pointed out in a comment, there are other expected consequences of Christianity, such as character traits, as described by the fruit of the spirit.

Where does this leave us? The limited range of outcomes in Reveal does not invalidate it findings, but rather examining a broader range of outcomes might produce a richer, and ultimately different, story.

What do you think? What should be the main outcomes measured in church surveys? This is a fascinating question because it's both theological and methodological.

At Mission O, Ministers Matter!

WHAT REVEAL DOES WELL #2

WHO IS BRADLEY WRIGHT?

An associate professor at the University of Connecticut where I study the sociology of Christianity. I am Christian, a husband and father, and someone who adores goofing around. Hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

http://brewright.blogspot.com/

Let's start with some things that Reveal does well:

First, they are collecting data. There's a lot in the church that can't be done by taking surveys, most important things probably; nonetheless, surveys can offer extremely valuable information for relatively little cost. Frankly, it's beyond me why any church wouldn't routinely survey its members. (I suppose that's why I'm a sociologist and not a pastor ;-).

I have been in countless meetings and discussions that hinged on questions such as "what do people in the church think about this" or "how many people are doing that." These are empirical questions, and they can be answered with some authority with surveys. If we care about them, why not take the time to answer them?

Second, they collected both qualitative and quantitative data. Just because surveys produce numbers we tend to be infatuated with them, but in-person interviews such as they conducted can also be valuable. Combining the two--numbers and words--is powerful for a relatively new area of study such as this one.

Third, they ask some very interesting applied questions. Sociologists and other researchers routinely use great research methods, but the questions we seek to answer can be a little... oh what's the word, dry? At our worst we publish about things that only a few others would care about. Some sociologists are able to break out of this and write about things of more broader relevance (Christian Smith comes to mind), but most of us are just filling up the shelves of university libraries. In contrast, the questions asked by Reveal seem to matter in a more fundamental level--at least for Christians. So I'm pleased to see social science methods being applied here.

Fourth, I think that one of their findings will prove especially valuable for the church--that Christians of different maturity levels need different things from their churches. That is, a church's activities are not one-size-fits-all. At various times in my life, I have attended churches clearly geared for someone other than me, and, gosh, was I bored.

At Mission O, Ministers Matter!

BRADLEY WRIGHT'S SUMMARY OF REVEAL #1

WHO IS BRADLEY WRIGHT?

An associate professor at the University of Connecticut where I study the sociology of Christianity. I am Christian, a husband and father, and someone who adores goofing around. Hobbies include photography, hang gliding, landscaping, and eating ice cream (listed in roughly ascending order of competence).

http://brewright.blogspot.com/

Willow Creek Church has recently conducted a several years worth of survey research about their church and various others. Their book, Reveal, summarizes the findings of this research and promises that "the answer will transform your church."

Given the importance of Willow Creek in the Evangelical world, and the novelty of this data-driven approach, I am taking the liberty of offering a review of this book. I'm a fan of Willow Creek, in general, and this book has done nothing to dissuade me. It's a useful first step in introducing survey methodology into the church context.

In reviewing it, I will take what is my somewhat standard approach and discuss what I think works well and what I think can be improved. As a sociologist, I'll focus on methodological issues more than church growth issues. I'll also make this into a series of posts so that I can elaborate more fully.

In launching this series, let me point out what may be a difference in cultures. In academia, if you think something is important, you give it your critical attention. If something is of little value, you just ignore it. In the rest of the (saner) world, critical attention means something else, usually less appealing. It's in an academic sense, then, that I review Reveal... to show my appreciation for what they have done and perhaps help people understand it more fully.

Data

The data examined in Reveal come from about 5,000 e-mailed surveys filled out by members of 7 different churches, identified as "geographically and culturally diverse." (The response rate is not given).

The questionnaire covered various questions about the respondents' church-related attitudes, practices, satisfaction, and participation with the church.

Measures

The most important measures cover what Reveal refers to a four step "spiritual continuum."

1) Exploring Christianity. "I believe in God but I'm not sure about Christ. My faith is not a significant part of my life"
2) Growing in Christ. "I believe in Jesus, and I'm working on what it means to get to know him."
3) Close to Christ. "I feel really close to Christ and depend on him daily for guidance."
4) Christ-Centered. "God is all I need in my life. He is enough.

They also measure spiritual growth as spiritual attitudes behaviors (e.g., tithing, evangelism, serving, reading the bible, praying, loving God, loving others). Spiritual growth is used mainly as a dependent or outcome variable (i.e., something to be explained).

Results

The study links these four stages to various attitudes and behaviors. For example, going from steps 1 to 4 increases rates of prayer, reading the Bible, tithing, serving, and evangelism.

They make conclude that:

1) Time spent in church does not predict spiritual growth
2) Progress on the spiritual continuum does predict spiritual growth.
3) The church has most influence on people in the early stages of the continuum. E.g., weekend services are critical for new believers but not for long-time attendees.
4) Personal spiritual practices predict Christ-centered living. (Here they introduce new language without defining it... it reads like a restatement of #2).
5) The churches most active evangelists, volunteers, and donors come from the higher steps of the continuum (this also is ultimately a restatement of #2).
6) One-quarter of the respondents were "spiritually stalled" or "dissatisfied" with the church's role in their spiritual growth.

Conclusion:

Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek, declares the findings painful and revolutionary.

At Mission O, Ministers Matter!