What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Counting our many blessings – Scottish Episcopal Statistics

    This Sunday is the day when the Scottish Episcopal Church counts how many people are in church. It isn’t a count of the number of people who want to be Episcopalians, it isn’t a count of those who say they are Episcopalians – in fact it isn’t even a count of Episcopalians at all. It is simply a count of the number of people who happen to be there on that particular Sunday.

    I like this Sunday because when the people are counted, I find myself counting them as so many wonderful blessings.

    I think that statistics are important and that they can tell us things. They can’t tell us everything but they can tell us a huge amount.

    Now, whenever we talk about the stats in the Scottish Episcopal Church we end up talking about how we gather them and there’s always people ready to say that the numbers that we gather are the wrong numbers.

    Some people want to make a case for gathering them as an average over a number of weeks. Others say that counting the number of people at Sunday services doesn’t come close to saying how many people the church deals with.

    To an extent that is true but it then leads on to absurd suggestions that instead of counting the number of people at worship we should count the number of people who come through the building. You get people wanting to count the Tai Chi group, the AA group that hires the hall or the dog club. I think some people are so desperate to pretend that their numbers are not in fact going downwards that they’d be happy to count the dogs.

    The truth is, we need to be fairly consistent in what we count. It isn’t the actual number that we arrive at that matters that much, however interesting it might be in any given year. The real question is how we are doing over time.

    I’ve been in many a meeting in the church where we assign money or other resources to something that we claim to be mission and then talk in the rest of the meeting as though we have no expectation at all that the numbers will go in anything other than a downward direction.

    I wish we did more with our statistics and I’m quite keen that we keep gathering them.

    The extraordinary thing that we discovered last year was that there are over 100 000 people in Scotland who think they are Anglicans, Episcopalians, C of E or some other Anglican variant of answering the question in the Census. The question that really should have been at the top of the agenda of a lot of our meetings is why we don’t seem to see more than about 15 000 of them on a Sunday.

    Here’s what I think:

    • The numerical trend has been going downwards for a long time.
    • The really steep fall is in those who claim to be part of the church but who are not communicants.
    • We shouldn’t be surprised that non-communicants have disappeared when we’ve been pushing communion as the main service for 40 years or so.
    • We don’t generally behave as though we believe our mission plans, policies and strategies are likely to succeed.
    • All the evidence points to the fact that our mission plans, policies and strategies (and we’ve had tons of them) have not succeeded.
    • The national profile of the church needs to be fixed.
    • We need to discover a new, respectful ecumenism that will help us to turn our backs on the kind of ecumenism that harms our ability to speak of having something distinctive.
    • Getting people to turn up on more Sundays in the month would give an immediate and dramatic boost to our numbers. We need to speak of why it is important to worship weekly again.
    • Churches with poor websites are going to go going out of business and for good reasons. They shouldn’t expect bail-outs from others.
    • The Scottish Episcopal Church has only ever really grown when it has been in the business of  opening new congregations.
    • You don’t plant new congregations unless you are confident that you’ve got something good that’s worth sharing.
    • The Scottish Episcopal Church may not be doing as badly as some other churches. We may be increasing in market share but need a bit of research to see whether that is the case.

    Anyway, all that being said, this Sunday counts because this is the Sunday when we do count.

    If you want to be counted yourself then you need to turn up.

    Like with most things.

    , ,

One response to “Reaching the Unconnected”

  1. David Kenvyn Avatar
    David Kenvyn

    The way the story has been presented in the press is somewhat misleading. What Glasgow Libraries are offering is not a new service. ICT equipment and training has been available in libraries throughout the UK, since the Blair government made the funding available in 1997.

    One of my first tasks in East Dunbartonshire was to write the successful bid for government funds from what was then known as the People’s Network. PCs, because that was the cutting edge technology at the time, were installed in libraries across the UK. Buddies were recruited for training programmes. People were taught, and can still be taught to use the appropriate technology in classes run through the various library services.

    Unfortunately, once the initial tranche of funding was exhausted, libraries were required to have their own sustainability programmes, but no funding was ring-fenced for this purpose.

    It is hardly surprising that there are differences in digital uptake between Dowanhill and Possilpark, or between Shawlands and Cardonald. Glasgow Libraries are now trying to deal with that digital difference, without any funding from the Scottish or UK Governments to do so. It is my view that they should be applauded for this initiative, which is an extension of the work that has been done over the last 18 years.

    You are quite right to say that this is a social justice issue. It is also vital to the success of the economy of the country. Perhaps we need to think about the creation of a new tranche of funding so that libraries can offer the cutting edge resources in ICT that people across Scotland need.

    Reply

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