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Summary
It’s always helpful to get multiple perspectives. With any research topic, multiple perspectives are actually needed. No one study is going to completely exhaust what needs to be known on that topic.
Good research pulls the curtain back on some of the claims out there that you have to change this aspect of what your church is doing [in worship] to have any kind of success
Church Plants
Talking specifically about church plants started since 2008. There’s 18 percent of those people who are previously completely unchurched–they’ve never been to church before based on the estimates of the people responding. And an additional 24 percent, who have been unchurched for many years, maybe they were, again these are estimates, but maybe they were going as children then they stopped going. This was their first time back in several years.
How Worship Teams can use Research
Each of the questions we asked related to worship on the Transformational Church Assessment measured how the church is doing worship, but not in a method standpoint. The questions were practical, so they’re things that a worship team could sit down and discuss and say, “How could we do this better?”
At the same time, they weren’t, “Do it this way, not that way,” type of methods. One example would be, is there a sense of expectation of what’s going to occur in the worship service among the congregation?
A worship team can sit down and say, “You know, our scores are pretty low here. There’s not a sense of expectation. What can we do to create that, but still within the way our church functions and within the way we think about worship?”
Church Attendance and Church Health
Church attendance is a key part of the health of the church. We exist to glorify God. If we’re doing worship well, as a church, more people will begin to attend worship and we’ll see more new commitments.
Mixing Statistics and Worship
Statistics depend on how orderly God has made the world. Because we can find patterns ‑‑ now, there’s some places where it’s completely noise, it’s completely chaos ‑‑ but throughout creation, we continue to find patterns. We continue to find order. We know from scripture, that especially in worship, God loves order.
What we’re saying is not that we can predict that more people will come to your worship services, if. We can say that it’s more likely that they’re going to come, if. So, the handful of questions we ask on the transformational church survey are helpful in that direction. They predict that. They say that it’s more likely. It doesn’t guarantee it, though.
You can be the off‑chance where it doesn’t happen. You could be the off‑chance where you don’t grow as much because there are a lot of other factors that the model can’t account for, but the fact that it’s accounting for a little more than half of what’s going on with the change in worship attendance, that’s describing a lot of what’s happening.
Be sure to Tweet your questions and comments to us: @LifewayResearch and individually: @smcconn, @statsguycasey, and @lizettebeard. Join us next time for another edition of Keep Asking.
(See the full transcript for the episode –with links–on next page)
