(Part 3 in a series)
As with the original Reveal, Follow Me gets high marks for asking the right question. Its focus is one spiritual growth, and it wants to know what moves a person from one stage of spiritual growth to another. It seems to me that this kind of question should be on the minds of every church leader—where do they want the Church to go, and how do they get it there? This obviously isn’t a new question for the church, for it’s been around for 2,000 years, but Follow Me reminds us of its importance.
Follow Me also reports an ambitious, on-going data collection effort. There are limitations, of course, to what the Church can learn from quantitative data, but we’re no where near those limits yet. Many of the questions routinely asked by church leaders can be answered, or at least informed, by collecting data. I foresee a time when individual churches routinely survey their members as part of their leadership activities. Again, not that the information from surveys is more “true” or valuable than other forms of information—I’m not advocating an empirically-driven church—rather collecting data is an easy, usually-valuable tool that belongs that all churches should consider.
Another strength of Follow Me is its illustration of how easy it is to collect data. So far the Reveal team has collected data from 150,000 people, and it appears that they did so for a minimal amount of time and money. They set up a web-based survey and had local churches recruit people to participate in the survey. Once filled out, the surveys were automatically converted to a database that the Reveal team could then analyze.
Compare this to the situation of even 20-30 years ago when a survey of 150,000 people would have involved 150,000 printed surveys manually entered into a data base. Web-based surveys are remarkably easy to conduct using inexpensive surveys such as Surveymonkey.com. It seems to be taking the church a little while to figure how easy surveys are, that they are something that could easily be done by any pastor or church leader. Once church leaders figure this out, church surveys might become as common as church newsletters or bulletins.
Next: Why Collect Data?
As with the original Reveal, Follow Me gets high marks for asking the right question. Its focus is one spiritual growth, and it wants to know what moves a person from one stage of spiritual growth to another. It seems to me that this kind of question should be on the minds of every church leader—where do they want the Church to go, and how do they get it there? This obviously isn’t a new question for the church, for it’s been around for 2,000 years, but Follow Me reminds us of its importance.
Follow Me also reports an ambitious, on-going data collection effort. There are limitations, of course, to what the Church can learn from quantitative data, but we’re no where near those limits yet. Many of the questions routinely asked by church leaders can be answered, or at least informed, by collecting data. I foresee a time when individual churches routinely survey their members as part of their leadership activities. Again, not that the information from surveys is more “true” or valuable than other forms of information—I’m not advocating an empirically-driven church—rather collecting data is an easy, usually-valuable tool that belongs that all churches should consider.
Another strength of Follow Me is its illustration of how easy it is to collect data. So far the Reveal team has collected data from 150,000 people, and it appears that they did so for a minimal amount of time and money. They set up a web-based survey and had local churches recruit people to participate in the survey. Once filled out, the surveys were automatically converted to a database that the Reveal team could then analyze.
Compare this to the situation of even 20-30 years ago when a survey of 150,000 people would have involved 150,000 printed surveys manually entered into a data base. Web-based surveys are remarkably easy to conduct using inexpensive surveys such as Surveymonkey.com. It seems to be taking the church a little while to figure how easy surveys are, that they are something that could easily be done by any pastor or church leader. Once church leaders figure this out, church surveys might become as common as church newsletters or bulletins.
Next: Why Collect Data?
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