This year both the CofE and the Anglican Church of Canada will be asking for new data items. In this blog I will consider why we do that and what is involved. The data items for the CofE are about new congregations and the data items for the ACC are about informal services.
As I have previously written, those who collect church statistics are generally passionate about the significance of those statistics for the mission of the church. We are also very aware of the issues of collecting those statistics. Thus there are many things we might like to collect and know about, but we are very reluctant to actually ask parishes for the information. I say this because it might seem to those in parishes that the stats people randomly ask for the most obscure data they can think of! Nothing could be further from the truth.
The process to include a new data item in the annual returns is convoluted and involves consulting with a variety of people. I work in a relatively informal structure in the ACC. I imagine that other denominations have a byzantine bureaucratic system to negotiate in order to add new data items. In any denomination for a new data item to be included It must be justified both in being essential and collectable.
Essential
What makes a data item essential? Simply put, we collect an item because we do not understand what is happening in the church without that data item. A great example of this is the pivot to online services during Covid. We absolutely needed to know what was happening in the churches through Covid. Churches needed to know if the congregations were being served or left to their own devices. We needed to know if this was going to be a significant means of connecting people to God and to each other beyond the pandemic.
But there is a difference between the phenomena we are wanting to understand and the data item we select in order to measure it. In the case of online services it took a lot of time to find the best data item because of the complexities of online provision. The consensus now is that the best data item is the number of services provided, not the numbers linking in to those services.
Collectable
We collect data in different ways depending on our governance, but ultimately most of the data we collect has to come from the parishes. That means that someone will reluctantly have to dig out the information we need. They will probably be overburdened and may not share the stats nurd’s excitement about the data. So we need to make any new data item easy to collect. Preferably it should be something they already collect or know. For example Anglican Churches have vestry books with a lot of data in them; or they may make reports to the tax office or other government organisation. Maybe the item will be something they should collect or know. Some churches ask what has happened to those who have left the church in the last year – have they left the area, or moved to a different church, or died, or just stopped attending.
A number of ACC data items come direct from the dioceses. I expect that somebody in the diocesan structure will know what is happening in the parishes. For example, we expect the dioceses to know how many parishes are holding online services.
We are reluctant to ask either parishes or dioceses to collect information which is unknown to them. For example, it would be really helpful to know the age and gender demographics in our churches. But we do not ask for that data because it is too complicated to collect.
CofE – New congregations
The new item asks for the number and name of new congregations/worshipping communities. The form for 2023 data is at https://parishreturns.churchofengland.org/. Those who submit the data will normally do so through an online form, but there are pdf and word versions so that the data can be collected.
Interesting that the CofE asks for the name, I wonder what they will be doing with that piece of information. New congregations and worshipping communities are clearly defined. There is an explicit message about the potential overlap between these data items and the “fresh expressions” recorded elsewhere in the form.
What is more interesting, at least to me, is that they also ask for congregations or worshipping communities which “came to an end”. Again they ask for the names of those communities. This gives a potentially rich mine of data, especially is the question is regularly repeated. I hope that these will produce helpful analysis going forward. This is a “special focus question” and I am not aware if it has been asked before or whether it will become a regular question
ACC – Informal services
The ACC is late to the party on this one. The CofE has been asking about “Fresh Expressions” for over ten years, albeit with some issues around definition. We are aware of a growing number of types of informal service, including Messy Church and wild Church alongside fresh expressions. We felt that we needed to gain an understanding of this, and we felt that dioceses needed to be aware of what is happening, if they are not already aware.
But this question also promotes awareness that these services are happening, much as the “fresh expression” question did in the CofE. Our hope is that we will see, through asking this question annually, how the ACC is changing. These services are one way the ACC is responding to the needs of the wider community for non-liturgical services as well as traditional liturgical services.
So I hope this has made it clear how engaged the process is for adding items to the annual return. Next week we will be looking at the other side of the coin – reducing data items – and why we might do that!
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