Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices - Blogs

August 18, 2014

What Do The Numbers Mean?

This past week I signed up for something called SoulPulse. It is designed as both a large research study and a personal resource to help you measure your spiritual life. Twice a day for two weeks, SoulPulse sends you a survey about what you are doing and your spiritual health at the time.

As this New Yorker article points out, measuring your spiritual health may be a somewhat dubious undertaking, but collecting more information about yourself can be a useful and revealing exercise. It's a way of paying attention.

I’m learning a bit about myself as I take this survey. Just the act of answering the questions forces me to reflect a bit, which I find somewhat helpful.

We talk a lot about numbers in the church—Sunday attendance, donations, the number of visitors to the church’s website—which is necessary and helpful. You can’t really understand your organization without collecting a bit of data.

But the numbers aren’t everything. Statistics have context, and require interpretation. I say this as a big believer in statistics and the scientific method. Dismissing something just because "you can make the numbers say anything you want" is lazy, but so is believing every number put in front of you without understanding the context or how it was collected and all the data that isn’t represented.

For example, how does your Sunday attendance compare to what’s happening in the rest of the church and the world? Donations might be down or up, but what is happening in the economy? Millennials are attending your church, is that a trend in the larger church or is something you are doing working especially well? There are lots of resources out there to help us do this, such as the Pew Forum.

All this is to say that metrics are necessary and useful. We should give ourselves measurable goals and pay attention to the data we collect. Often numbers, such as Sunday attendance, can show us patterns we might not notice otherwise.

On the other hand, it’s possible to become obsessed with the numbers in a way that is unhelpful, to demand that everything be measured and put into spreadsheets and reports. We all know that people are too complicated to be measured quite so easily. Ultimately, SoulPulse may be able some offer conclusions about me with the data they collect, but SoulPulse doesn’t know me, doesn’t have the entire context to really understand my spiritual health.

The solution, I think, is not to ignore the numbers or pretend that they don’t matter, but to remember that it is our job, with God’s help, to interpret the numbers. They are just data, and collecting data is another way of paying attention. It can always help us understand better, as long as we know how to use it and know it’s limits, all the things it can and it can’t tell us.