Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Curing Christians' Stats Abuse by Ed Stetzer

Ed Stetzer, of Lifeway Research, has just published a great article in Christianity Today about Christianity and statistics. It's entitled "Curing Christians' Stats Abuse" but it subtitle is even more telling: "The statistics we most love to repeat may be leading us to make bad choices about the church."

Some of the best-known, most frequently-repeated stats about U.S. Christianity also happen to be factually incorrect. Stetzer focuses on those involving church growth, but there are numerous other examples.

His article is definitely worth a read.

2 comments:

Mark said...

When I was younger it was a much simpler time. In those days we didn't call it "stats abuse". We called it LYING!

By the way. the first comment is in chinese and it says:

"beautiful city said...
this is the first time
I have read your blog.
Enjoyed it."

Brad Wright said...

Thanks for the translation, Mark.

I'm not always sure that stats abuse is lying in that the people who do it often think they are telling some form of truth.