2018 End-of-Year Stats Rev. Nate Berneking, Director of Finance and - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

2018 End-of-Year Stats Rev. Nate Berneking, Director of Finance and Administration

2016 General Conference New Tables for 2017-2020

3 Tables Watch Previous Webinar at: www.moumethodist.org/yearendstats

New Table IV Specific to Missouri Annual Conference

Why a New Table? • We were not looking to create more work or to make things confusing. • We actually want to be helpful. • We had long felt a gap in what was asked in Tables I-III and what was actually useful for a local church to know and consider. • Best examples are probably membership and “professions of faith,” which Table I ties specifically to membership in the local church. Both categories of data are still useful to the Conference and General Church but less so to the local church, especially those churches deemphasizing membership or placing high requirements on members. • Some of the data requested by Tables I-III seemed to set churches up to fail. • The problem of “average” worship attendance. Everything (other than Easter) weighs against the average (i.e. rain, snow, ballgames, clergy vacations). What raises the average? Maybe Easter or a kids program.

It Isn’t That Worship Attendance Is Unimportant • Rather we wanted a “new scorecard,” not just to make ourselves feel better, but to get a better sense of what’s really happening. • Bishop Farr has long insisted that our churches seem healthier than the numbers, taken alone, seem to suggest. • “Wins” in ministry come in a variety of expressions. We want to acknowledge that the Holy Spirit is accomplishing incredible work even in smaller churches with smaller attendance numbers. • We wanted to recategorize professions of faith more broadly.

New Priorities • In 2018, the Conference adopted three new priorities, and our success and failure in those priorities required some new data that we’d never collected and that Tables I-III ignored (or subsumed in more general questions). • New Places for New People • Missional Leaders • Pathway Out of Poverty • A 2018 survey gave us a bit of a baseline, but we now have to begin collecting this data more consistently.

Six Categories

Worship Attendance • Average Attendance, but broken down by site • This is not just for large churches. • Recall our protocols for counting that we adopted last year (Cf. Worship Counting Protocols). Regular services with the basic parts of worship count for attendance. That would include regular youth services or regular services held at nursing homes. This breakdown will help local churches with their various sites, but it will also be helpful to the Bishop and Cabinet in understanding what attendance really looks like in a particular church.

Worship Attendance • Most commonly observed attendance, or for the statisticians among us, the “mode” • Take every single Sunday and the attendance on each. What attendance occurs the most? 134, 105, 103, 105, 102, 165, 105, 102, 105, 100=105 • Why? In some ways, it’s a much better picture of what’s really going on in a church. What the health is really like. It eliminates horrible Sundays but is also more honest than what you see on Easter Sunday.

Worship Attendance • The highest attendance? It does mean something. And, it’s great to celebrate it. • The lowest attendance? Not nearly as fun, but this also means something. But, let’s set some rules on this one: • No snow days. So, 0 or even 34 when you normally see 300 shouldn’t be recorded. Find the lowest attendance on what should have been a typical Sunday. It’s not an exact science. We’re really just trying to get a sense of the range of typical worship.

Professions of Faith • Let’s define the phrase: Any sort of experience in which an individual commits or recommits themselves to following Christ when they had not made such commitment or after a period of absence. Again, it’s not an exact science. We ask you to be honest and to report with integrity. But, we also know membership doesn’t always follow a profession or commitment of faith. • Confirmation • Baptism (other than infants) • Worship (altar calls or other sorts of public commitments…membership or not) • Other Contexts (youth groups, camps or adult small groups) • Total

Community Exposure • Number of non-church settings in which the local church participates in the surrounding community EXPLICITLY IN THE NAME OF THE CHURCH • Might overlap with New Places for New People (if it qualifies as one) • NA/AA Groups or maybe youth programs in the schools or community, but the key is that its done IN THE NAME OF THE CHURCH. • Number of formalized partnerships with outside, local organizations, schools included • Will overlap with Pathway Out of Poverty Question • Two sub-questions (individuals and direct conversation) • Number of other activities requiring lay members of the local church and clergy to engage in direct personal conversation with individuals who are not yet fully committed to Christian discipleship

New Places for New People • We define “new places for new people” on our website www.moumethodist.org/newplacesfornewpeople. • These requests are actually identical to those of the survey we conducted (with subsets added). You should duplicate anything reported in the survey. We are assuming you are reporting them in both places.

New Places for New People • Number of new small groups (with at least one person new to the church) started in 2018 • Number of unique individuals new to the church included in those small groups • Number of Recovery Ministries started in 2018 • Number of unique individuals new to the church involved in those ministries • Number of new “Missional Communities” started in 2018 • Number of unique individuals new to the church involved in those Missional Communities • Number of new Worship services started in 2018 • Average worship attendance for new worship service in 2018 • Number of unique individuals new to the church who regularly participated in the new worship service (once a month or more)

Missional Leaders • Again, we have already defined what we mean by this. A “missional leader” is someone who: (a) moves from meeting God to an active, growing and authentic faith in Jesus Christ; and (b) is identified as a leader and is mentored by another leader; and (c) provides leadership in their local church and/or beyond, and (d) identifies and has begun mentoring a new leader. • The second request is really self-explanatory and is keyed to a couple Conference provided events: Candidacy Summit and/or the Briefing for Part-time Ministerial Leaders.

Pathway Out of Poverty • Asks some questions with respect to various school partnership ministries and the activities conducted in those partnerships • Looking for the number of volunteers your church sent to Puerto Rico/Vieques as part of our partnership

Reporting Online • Go to https://umcdata.net/MissionConnect/Public/MCWebApps/Statistics/#/index.html?conf=MO • Username and Password: Username is GCFA number and password is Conference ID (on apportionment statement) • If you forgot your username or password, call your district office. • The district and Conference office can see when you have started and when you have actually submitted. • The district and Conference will try to call or email you if they see significant increases or decreases, especially in the expenses (Table II). If you fail to resolve an issue, it could affect apportionments with no means of changing that until the following year. • These calls/emails are for the local church’s benefit. Please do not get frustrated if you get more than one call. • Once apportionments are calculated, we cannot fix them, even if there was a reporting mistake. • Reporting is the pastor’s (and local church’s) sole responsibility by Discipline. We do our best to catch mistakes, but we do not have access to the information needed to audit every report.