Category Archives: Data

Data, World Unitarianism and Universalism

The Unitarian center: UK edition

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Last year I made a somewhat silly mapping thought exercise: locating the geographic center of the membership of the Unitarian Universalist Association. That’s one way to describe what holds us all together, I suppose.

This year, I’ve sought out and geocoded all the member churches of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, in Great Britain. I have some observations and a map like I made for the UUA, but there are some lingering choices for how to render the map. So instead, I’ll tell where the centerpoint — er, centrepoint — for UK Unitarians, based on the reported quota numbers. (With the understanding that this probably isn’t an adequate way to measure membership, much less participation.)

The proper location is on a farm south of Barton-under-Needwood, in Staffordshire, just off the A38. Hardly the place for 3,600-plus Unitarians and Free Christians, who’d about double the population. So let’s call it nearby Burton upon Trent, which has about 44,000 residents and at least has a train station on a main line.

To tell you the truth, I was hoping for Ashby-de-la-Zouch (for the name alone).

Data, Unitarian Universalist Association

Map of Unitarian Universalist Association-member congregations

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Voila! A map of Unitarian Universalist Association-member congregations — click in, if you’re on the main page —

Or click here. (You may need to zoom in a level to see the detail.)

For size, I’ve restricted the map to the continental United States and southern Canada — also, because I’m using a free-of-charge Mapbox account. (This one map takes up 80% of the free allotment.) It didn’t take as long to make this project as I feared, but that’s because I had already prepared the lat-long data. (Accordingly, it’s only as fresh as February.) Indeed, much of the time was just playing with my options.

Note: the purple circles are congregations, with the area of the circle scaled to the size of the congregation. So emerging congregations (having no reported members) and those with membership 12 and under appear as a single point.

Scout around it. I’d love to know

  1. what discoveries you make, and
  2. what features you would like to see in future versions
Data, Ministerial practice, Unitarian Universalist Association

Unfellowshipped ministers in Unitarian Universalist congregations

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There no reason (anymore, from a Universalist perspective) that a minister without ministerial fellowship in the UUA can’t serve a UU congregation. There are some denominational oddments around inclusions in directories — unimportant to the living — so I have to think the reason to note such in our once-print, now-online directory is to note who’s not in the guild. (The auslander clergy were marked with a # — alas, not in scarlet ink.)

Noodling around the online directory and the General Assembly certification numbers to re-set the UUA geographic epicenter — to come — I discovered the notation lives, and thanks to a customized Google search can see the list all in one place. More than I would have guessed, too. The term “Non UU” may not be quite fair — some of these ministers must surely be members of the churches they serve. Some are in federated and multi-denominational parishes; others are in out-of-the-way areas. But not all. Many emerited. An interesting mix.

See them here.

Art and culture, Data, Technology

Chosing an e-reader

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I wanted a e-book reader since I’m reading more these day, and particularly in time for General Assembly, including the bus ride to and fro. Discussed this last year, and had ruled out the Kindle as being too wed to a proprietary e-book format.  Interested, initially, in the newly-released Barnes and Noble Nook Simple Touch Reader — which seems to be poised as a basic Kindle competitor — until I held actually one and read the specs, and found them wanting.  In short, I thought it too wide (even if lighter) and I wanted to read not books and other documents, but also listen to music and I do appreciate the color images, if not the lower battery life. But the lack of PDF support was the killer.

So I bought the Nook Color, even though it’s more than $100 more.

But I’m still learning it and not completely sold. Indeed, I’m not Barnes and Noble’s ideal reader; for one, I’m more likely to download historic, public domain PDFs from Google Books or Archive.org than buy a new composition, for which I’m still prone to paper. And that’s the rub. It seems that the Google Book PDFs have encoding that make them unreadable, and must be altered — and I’ve got to figure out how to do that — first. Or the Google Books epubs, because they’re generated from a converted scan of the original are thick with typos and gemlins, which makes some practically unreadable.

So I may take it back and do without if I can’t come up with a good solution.

And if I do come up with some solutions, I’ll post them here. Also, I need a way to convert the documents I’ve published a PDF — minimally James Relly’s Union — as an epub.

Data

Rapture post 2: follow the earthquakes

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Here at Universalist Labs, we take data seriously. If you think Christ’s second coming will be occasioned by earthquakes, then perhaps you’d want to know where the earthquakes are, and how strong they are. (Helpful too if people suffer because of earthquakes and you want to know their extent.)

For a current list, see this one from the National (U.S.) Earthquake Information Center.

And if you’d prefer an RSS feed or a file with which you can map the ‘quakes with Google Earth.

Church development, Church mission and identity, Data, World Unitarianism and Universalism

Dirty numbers and the British Unitarians

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I’m about to wade into deep water. I mean no offense, nor do I plan to come off as a pushy American. But I’m thinking about the stated executive goal of the British Unitarians to grow by 20% in five years. I found their 2010 (current) annual report, which for the first time has membership statistics.

The numbers, to me, say do or die. (The following calculations, while accurate, are naive of statistical analysis and independent confirmation; thus the title.)

The 163 member churches in England, Scotland and Wales have a aggregate membership of  3,672. The largest church is Rosslyn Hill Chapel, Hampstead, London with 168 members. But the second largest is Dean Row Chapel, Wilmslow, with 80. Sixty-one congregations have 10 members or fewer.

What would it take to get to 4,406, a twenty-percent increase? Well . . .

  • if each congregation currently with 60 members or more made a net increase of 5% per year, each year, and
  • if each congregation currently from 20 to 59 members made a net increase of 2 members per year, each year, and
  • if each congregation currently under 20 members made a net increase of 1 member per year . . .

the General Assembly would increase by 34% after five years.

But hitting stasis would be a laudable and difficult goal for some. As I’ve said in the United States setting, this plan calls for new congregations and an examination of where they’re missing.

But you can run the numbers yourself with this comma-separated values spreadsheet sorted by home country, city, congregational name (where needed) and membership.

Bloggers, Data, History, Small churches, Unitarian Universalist family matters, World Unitarianism and Universalism

Blog posts I’m reading today: our past and future

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Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger Elz Curtiss (Politywonk) writes movingly about the hagiographic and political misuse of Unitarian and Universalist history, and it power to misshape the truth about our traditions. Worth reading.

Unitarian minister and blogger Stephen Lingwood (Reignite) talks data — the size of congregations in the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches (GA), our counterpart body in Great Britain (and a handful of congregations elsewhere, like the UUA) just reported in its Annual Report. (Can’t find it online.) Unlike the UUA, the GA doesn’t have a historical practice of publishing congregational size data, so this report is noteworthy, if chilling. He sounds the wake-up call, given the smallness by congregations and overall of the GA — only one of the GA’s 170 churches wouldn’t be classed as “small” in the UUA — and how many congregations could easily slip below the water line.

It also makes me think the Church Admin plugin for WordPress I noted might be more useful for the British churches of 15 to 60 members than the American ones I was imagining for a use case. (The developer is also British and that comes across in the plugin.) Since it’s in rapid development, I’ve not properly tested it, but I’d be willing to do so if any British Unitarians would like to examine it with me.

Data, Ministerial practice

Single? No parish for you.

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My husband sent me a link to an article in the New York Times. (With the paywall soon to go up, expect to see a lot of links to the Grey Lady, as it’s really — as a work colleague called it — a “paysieve” and links get through.)

It considers the poor professional prospects for single evangelical ministers, and notes the built-in rationale for church planting. (A preacher’s parallel to “publish or perish” — parish or perish?)

This phenomenon is rather different among Unitarian Universalists, but with the Hot Stove Report out — founded and reprinted by Unitarian Universalist ministers Hank Peirce (on Facebook) and Dan Harper (open web) respectively — I expect to see, as usual, a disproportionally large number of white, straight, married fathers be called to the larger churches in more desirable cities. (With white, straight, married mothers filling in generally.) But without the data, it’s hard to make that stick.

“Unmarried Pastor, Seeking a Job, Sees Bias” by Eric Eckholm. New York Times. (March 21, 2011)

Church administration, Data, FOSS, New Church Office, Social networking, Technology

What I’m reading; all nonfiction

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I have four three-ring binders on my desk. Each with a print-out of a book in it.

I shuttle them in turn between home and work, since peculiarly, they touch both on my work and personal — that is to say, church — life, and I thought you might be interested in these four nonfiction reference works which take up my lunch hour and early evenings.

The first two deal with organizing data and people in nonprofit settings. More or less.

The other two deal with accounting, and while referring to software systems, are useful for reinforcing accounting concepts.

All sound too dull? I’ve also got “Frederic Henry Hedge: Unitarian Theologian of the Broad Church,” the spring-summer 1981 number of the Unitarian Universalist Christian journal. But that’s for kicks, and — alas — not online.

Data, Unitarian Universalist Association

The word you’re looking for is decimation

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Unitarian Universalist minister and blogger Dan Harper ran some of the UU congregation membership numbers, following the close of the 2011 certification period. In order to have a voting representation at General Assembly, congregations must certify their operations (held elections and worship services) and their membership. They must also make a financial contribution.

This last one is important, as non-giving suggests an unspoken or non-public grievance, since I gather even a single dollar would qualify (if not be terribly useful). But that’s for another time. What we have now are fresh membership numbers.

Three observations, with the caveat that that the facts behind these seem so volatile that I wouldn’t make any predictions from them. I’m comparing the newly certified numbers with last year’s, including any congregations admitted in midyear.

  1. Some congregations grew quite well. On a percentage basis — and ruling out the very small and a federated churches as outliers — the top two are
    • Unitarian Universalist Church of Cortland (Cortland, N.Y.), to 57 from 31.
    • Sacred Journey Fellowship (Garland, Texas), to 41 from 26.

    Congratulations.

  2. But what of two congregations? I was pleased how easily last year’s last mapped to this year’s list, with two exceptions.
    • Rainier Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Seattle, Wash.), 45 members.
    • Universalist Church of Westbrook (Westbrook, Me.), 24 members.

    These churches have an expired domain and a calendar un-updated since 2008 respectively. Is it too much to think they disbanded, merged with another congregation or disaffiliated? And if so, why is it so hard to get information about former churches; this used to be announced like a life passage. I welcome news about these. [Later. Found this blog post that mentions Ranier Valley’s closure in passing. Near the bottom.]

  3. And the big news, which occasions such a miserable blog post title. 147 congregations lost 10% or more of its reported membership in the last year. Some of these members can be surely recovered, but it’s hard to account for the diminished morale in losing fellow church-members, not to mention the lost donations. Some of these congregations were very small to begin with, so it might only take a couple of people to loose 10%. Some, too, are federated and seem to be loosing their Unitarian or Universalist part. But these two groups (federated, and where 10% or more means 3 persons or fewer) is only 14 churches. And four congregations with more than 500 members in 2010 lost more than 100 members when reporting for 2011.
  4. Assuming the two lost congregations aren’t simply a case of clerical error (pun intended), then the net change from last year is 1,152. A loss of 1,152.