Statistics evening – your feedback
At our statistics evening on Monday 24 September, we asked the parishes represented to tell us what other information would be useful for their mission and outreach.
Comments came back in three quantitative categories around parish boundaries, parish organisations and dashboard information/annual returns.
Other comments and questions clustered around discovering the factors that help a church to grow and would require qualitative research, some of which could be done at parish level.
Parish Boundaries
In the Church of Ireland, a parish is a geographical area in which a church is placed and where it ministers. The parish boundaries do not match the civil boundaries, but our census data has been reconciled as closely as possible with the parish maps to give a true reflection of parish demographics. The personal details collected by NISRA are completely confidential, but it may be possible with their help to drill down into particular wards in order to get a more detailed picture. Almost all of the parish boundary maps are up to date and work continues to resolve any outstanding issues.
Parish Organisations
We appreciate that many of our parishes are very busy throughout the week with thousands of people passing through our premises or meeting in homes. As a diocese we would like to devise a way of measuring this engagement, perhaps by collecting data in different categories via the parish returns on a rolling basis – children and youth one year, discipleship the next etc. Such an undertaking would need to be weighed against the administrative burden on the parishes and on the diocesan office.
Dashboard Information and Annual Returns
There were requests for each individual church to have its own dashboard and this is possible where returns data is available. Other helpful suggestions included sharing data amongst parishes of a similar size and demographic; looking at area deaneries as statistical units; introducing a better measure of adult baptism numbers (which would also serve as an indicator of new professions of faith) and discovering a way to ascertain regularity of worship. As said during the presentation, however, it may be easier and more useful to try and measure the size of the total worshipping community.
Thank you for your feedback which will be taken into account in planning future data collection. We hope that you will view the submission of parish and census returns as genuinely valuable in understanding your own church situation.
Thanks once more to Dr Bev Botting for being so generous with her time and expertise.