Faulty statistics

Have you noticed how attracted we are to numbers and statistics? We hardly will believe a word without a number attached. Do 75% of people believe, than this democratic nation better ratify it! Does the word show up more than 60 times in Scripture, than it must be an especially important concept to God.  How many people subscribe. At which station is gas a penny cheaper. Numbers numbers numbers.

"A journalist, a psychologist and a statistician are travelling from London to Edinburgh by train. As the train crosses the border, the three travellers look out of the window and notice a black sheep standing alone in a field. The journalist says, “Look! The sheep in Scotland are black.” To which the psychologist replies, "Actually, we can conclude at least one sheep in Scotland is black”. The statistician shakes his head and boldly states, “I think you’ll find we can confidently say that at least one half of one sheep in Scotland is black.”

I'm afraid we've lost respect for at least two things that are challenging to staticize, intuition of logic and intuition of experience. I once heard Josh Moody, pastor at College Church in Wheaton, speak respectfully of his grandmothers theological nose. He recognized that years of seminary at times fell short in comparison to years of church life, the intuition of experience. He told how she was able to sniff out heresy long before he was able to logically calculate it. Oh how guilty I am of brushing aside an octogenarians suggestion because he cannot give a statistic or outnumber me in verses that apply to the situation. The intuition of logic becomes clear the more one reads Scripture. We begin to see verses that we memorize and dishonorably handle out of context. We begin to find grand nuances of the Word that God has written through the whole rather than the part. 

I am motivated to connect these thoughts to their origin - that of statistics in the church. It is quite fascinating to me to see which denominations give the most, which have the highest percentage of weekly vs nominal attendance, which read scripture. And I grant myself that this must, in some way, display the fruits of which I John speaks. Yet how much more obvious it is when one grows in intuition. Yes, you can in fact discern believers by a series of tests that The author specifically explains. You can see a healthy church and be attracted to it. You can identify sin without giving an explicit verse. And it will be the grandmothers who have been reading every day, not me with my searchable bible software, who discerns best. It will be to the grandfathers whose counseling has borne fruit, not the recent seminary grad who wrote a book, that we should defer judgement. 

God does rule his church through numbers. That number is a group called elders. The word elder has qualifications that have nothing to do with statistics or education.