{"id":32894,"date":"2022-09-10T16:27:19","date_gmt":"2022-09-10T21:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/episode-02-the-problem-of-bad-stats-and-a-closer-look-at-pastor-attrition\/"},"modified":"2022-09-10T16:27:19","modified_gmt":"2022-09-10T21:27:19","slug":"episode-02-the-problem-of-bad-stats-and-a-closer-look-at-pastor-attrition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/episode-02-the-problem-of-bad-stats-and-a-closer-look-at-pastor-attrition\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode 02: The Problem of Bad Stats and a Closer Look at Pastor Attrition"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<div class=\"powerpress_player\" id=\"powerpress_player_9154\"> http:\/\/ministrysites.s3.amazonaws.com\/podcasts\/keepasking\/EP2_KEEPASKING.mp3<\/div>\n<p class=\"powerpress_links powerpress_links_mp3\">Podcast: Play in new window &#8211; Download<\/p>\n<h3>Summary<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Meet the podcast team from Lifeway Research:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Scott McConnell, executive director<\/li>\n<li>Lizette Beard, qualitative director<\/li>\n<li>Casey Oliver, statistician<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Rant of the Day: Misuse of Convenience Sampling (02:10)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Too many times a survey is done with people who were the most convenient to ask.<\/p>\n<p>Your friends aren\u2019t representative of a wider group, so sometimes when we see stats out there we want to know hey, who did you ask? How did you ask them? Where did those come from? A lot of times the answer to that is: they asked the people who were convenient to ask. And we call that convenience sampling. Sometimes that\u2019s through their social media account or sometimes it\u2019s through, their audience, maybe it\u2019s through a newsletter.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s bad methodology when a person (or group) surveys their newsletter subscribers, website visitors, or conference attendees and then reports the results as if they represent &#8220;all Americans&#8221; or &#8220;all pastors.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Because a convenience sample is not the setting you actually want to describe. It\u2019s the people you can get easily. If you\u2019re at an event and you ask the people at that event to answer some questions, that can be helpful for the conversation you have in that room. As soon as you go to another setting, which would be a conversation where you\u2019re talking about churches across the nation or you\u2019re talking about adults or men in America, those conversations are completely different. It\u2019s a different setting.<\/p>\n<p>Pastor Protection Research Project<\/p>\n<div class='code-block code-block-1' style='margin: 8px 0;clear: both'> <\/div>\n<p>We\u2019ve seen a lot of statistics. Honestly, a lot of times it\u2019s somebody quoting somebody else who quoted somebody else who quoted somebody else. It\u2019s hard to get back to the original statistics. We actually had Dr. Richard Dawkins and the North American Mission Board approach Lifeway Research saying, we\u2019re having trouble getting to the real statistics that keep being quoted. From what we found, they don\u2019t appear to be very reliable. So as we dug into it, the research that most people were quoting said that many pastors were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>leaving the ministry every year<\/li>\n<li>struggling with pornography<\/li>\n<li>struggling in their marriage<\/li>\n<li>ready to quit<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div style=\"clear:both;margin-top:0em;margin-bottom:1em\">\n<div class=\"centered-text-area\">\n<div class=\"centered-text\" style=\"float: left\">\n<div class=\"u2f140ae26ef8ee9d538b66b5f1bbb20b-content\">See also&nbsp; U.S. Pastors Identify Their Greatest Needs<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"ctaButton\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>We found that those were incredibly inflated because [the survey] took place at a conference and it happened to be a bunch of pastors who were needing help.<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re always worried about your own finances, you\u2019re going to be making decisions a little more defensively in that church setting<\/p>\n<p>There were several warning signs that the research identified that can really signal when a pastor might be in trouble. We began with qualitative research where experts kind of guided us toward the topics we needed to cover in the research. Some of the warning signs that surfaced:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>conflict in the church,<\/li>\n<li>issues in their own family,<\/li>\n<li>burnout,<\/li>\n<li>moral lapses,<\/li>\n<li>lack of preparation or a poor fit in their church.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Over half of pastors indicate that they\u2019re concerned about the financial security of their family.<\/p>\n<p>Honestly, that doesn\u2019t land in the family category. It lands in the conflict category. So when a little bit of conflict comes up, you\u2019re going to be looking to get out of that conflict because you don\u2019t want to risk your job and your family\u2019s welfare because you really need that job.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re definitely reminded that pastoral ministry is a people business.<\/p>\n<p>I think a lot of times in a seminary setting, you\u2019re needing to learn a lot of facts and how those facts work together. Any time those courses can put those in the context of people\u2019s lives, that\u2019s going to help pastors apply it in their ministry later on because it\u2019s all about people.<\/p>\n<p>6 Ways Churches Can Help Pastors Thrive &#8211; Facts &amp; Trends<\/p>\n<p>6 Thoughts for Pastors on Personal Finances (by Eric Geiger)<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><em>(See the full transcript for the episode &#8211;with links&#8211;on next page)<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"entry-pagination pagination\">Pages: Page 1 Page 2<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>http:\/\/ministrysites.s3.amazonaws.com\/podcasts\/keepasking\/EP2_KEEPASKING.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window &#8211; Download Summary Meet the podcast team from Lifeway Research: Scott McConnell, executive director Lizette Beard, qualitative director Casey Oliver, statistician Rant of the Day: Misuse of Convenience Sampling (02:10) Too many times a survey is done with people who were the most convenient to ask. Your friends aren\u2019t &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/episode-02-the-problem-of-bad-stats-and-a-closer-look-at-pastor-attrition\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Episode 02: The Problem of Bad Stats and a Closer Look at Pastor Attrition&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}