Over the last week I have had two conversations about statistics and in each case there is something missing or hidden if you just look at the information as presented in the table.  This was also an important point at a church committee meeting on Saturday where we were working on the 2009 budget.  Not statistics but financial data and the way that the accounting professionals presented it to us: while correct by their professional standards, it did not always make it straight-forward to understand exactly where the money was coming from and going to.

Statistics are frequently tricky and if you want proof of that from another perspective, and you are not already reading it, Bradley Wright, a professor of sociology interested in the sociology of Christianity has a series going right now on statistics at his blog, fittingly named, Bradley Wright’s Weblog.  I really enjoy his writing, but that may be because I am a fellow academaniac.

Anyway, here are the two I was discussing…

The first statistic:  Contemporary Christian Music
This one began with the observation that almost everything we sing in worship was “contemporary” at one time.  Like I explained to my kids yesterday (to the usual eye roll that Dad is doing it again) the two great Issac Watts hymns our preacher chose for worship (that they didn’t really care for) were significant because of the influence Watts had in moving English worship music away from the literal Psalter.  (And I do realize that there are some readers who consider that the beginning of the end for mainline Reformed worship.)

But what about contemporary worship music today.  One measure of what is being sung is the monthly list from Christian Copyright Licensing International, better known as CCLI.  This is who a church pays the small royalty fee to when they use modern music in worship for congregational singing.  Well the August 2008 list is now available and while it includes a few that our congregation regularly sings in worship most are not used in my church.  It is interesting that the list includes one song, Lord I Lift Your Name On High, with the incredibly low CCLI number of 117947.  (Like a serial number giving the approximate order it entered the CCLI catalog.)  Twenty two of the songs on the list have numbers above one million and many above four million.

The oldest list available from the search page is August 1997.  What is the latest and greatest on that list… You guessed it, good old 117947, Lord I Lift Your Name On High.  But as I look down the eleven year old list I recognize most of the songs as ones that we regularly sing in worship.  Is my church so out of date in singing these “traditional” songs that everyone else has passed us by so they no longer appear on the CCLI list?  No, when we, and other churches, sing them now it is “please open your hymnals to number 36.”

While the CCLI list is a useful tool for the “cutting edge” contemporary music, once a song has been widely adopted and enters the hymnals it drops off the CCLI list.  The CCLI list ceases to be a good measure of all “contemporary” worship music, at least if contemporary music goes back more than a few years.

(In putting this post together I found on the CCLI site the results of a survey they did of their license holders about music in worship.  What is the problem here?  It is the sample population.  If they only sampled their license holders they completely missed congregations that exclusively use printed material not requiring a CCLI license.  None the less, there is some interesting stuff in those statistics but I’ll leave that for another time.)

The second statistic:  Churches Leaving the PC(USA)
I make frequent mention of the Presbyterian Church (USA) annual statistics and the decline in membership numbers.  What is interesting is that while the number of members has declined by more than 2%, the number of churches has declined by less than 1%.  Yes, part of this is that the vast majority of churches in the PC(USA) are losing members, but part of the difference might be from how the PC(USA) accounts for the statistics when a church leaves the denomination.

As best as I can figure out, in the case where a congregation choses to disaffiliate, rather than request a transfer, and an administrative commission can identify a minority to continue the church, the result in the statistics is a large relative loss of membership, but no loss of a church.  I am not saying this is a false reporting of the information; it is a technically correct way to list the data.  I am just pointing out that it does mask the nature of the membership loss that occurred.  It almost seems we need a category for “continuing churches decimated by schism.”  Where are footnotes when you need them.

So that is what I have seen masked in how the statistics are reported.