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 I've just been reading Freakonomics.
One thing that's remarkable about the book is its simplicity, that the authors do nothing more complicated than ask slightly bizarre questions of large amounts of data. I guess they aren't scared of the numbers, they know what to do with them, to control some variables whilst focussing on others. But it's the questions that unearth the pearls, the bizarreness, the freakiness that points to the truth. So Levitt (the economist whose thinking is behind Freakonomics) asks "Why do teacher's cheat?", "Why do drug dealers live with their Mums?", "which are the most harmful to children - guns or swimming pools?" and "Who calls their daughter 'Madison'?" When you fire these queries at the right block of data, you discover that teachers cheat because they are a part of a system which rewards exam success and doesn't audit properly, drug dealers live with their Mums because they are poorly paid but take that kind of job because it's the only path to success open to them, swimming pools are more harmful to children than guns and aspirational parents call their daughter Madison because they want to be like the family on the next block who have two nice cars, a swimming pool in the back garden and a daughter called Madison.
Now kicking around the Church is a similar set of large data, it's the returns that Churches produce each year and get published in our year book. Now the questions I would want to ask of that rich and historical set of data are: 1. Why do some Churches grow and others shrink 2. Does the age of a minister matter? 3. Does it matter whether that minister knows how to use powerpoint? 4. Does it help to unite or link with the Church down the road? 5. Should Churches install swimming pools? 6. Which Churches teach us to be Jesus freaks?
I'm going after the data, to see if I can get a hold of some of these answers.
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