Funny how pervasive data have become in our lives. Seemingly no facet of our existence escapes quantification. Diet? The Food and Drug Administration will sate your appetite for numbers. Economics? Please—the Federal Reserve is awash in them. Education? The U.S. Department of Education needed an entire building just to roll theirs out.

Martin Davis is director of the Congregational Resource Guide. Reach him at mdavis@alban.org.

So it shouldn’t surprise that faith doesn’t escape statistics' long arm. This past year has seen no shortage of information rolled out. All of it interesting, most of it good, and undeniably useful.

But those who deal with data daily are quick to express one caveat. Numbers are not the whole story. Good thing for those in mainline congregations, because the numbers aren’t very encouraging.

Consider: Recent survey data from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has stressed that mainline congregations are no longer congregations with long-standing members, but fluid institutions where people come, go, and return with new ideas and thoughts and practices. Hence, overall numbers have been in a slow state of decline for many years. Some take this to mean that mainline communities are, if not dead, staring up from the bottom of the grave while statisticians heap on more dirt.

The Barna Group, a for-profit research firm based in California, drove this point home again this week when it released its most recent report on the condition of the mainline church. "Gloom and doom" sums it up nicely. In short, the report says, the mainline traditions are dying because they can’t appeal to the young. Thus, "there has been a 22 percent drop in the percentage of adults attending mainline congregations who have children under the age of 18 living in their home." And "young adults (25 or younger) are six percent of the national population, they are just one-third as many (two percent) of all adults attending mainline churches." But again, numbers are not the whole story.

Even Barna senses this, as he inserted his own caveat at the end of the press release which, to that point, had said nothing encouraging about the mainline’s future. He "indicated that the approach that many mainline churches take toward some current social issues—e.g., environmental challenges, poverty, cross-denominational cooperation, developing respectful dialogue, embracing new models for faith expression, and global understanding—position those churches well for attracting younger Americans."

Examples aren't hard to come by. In Copenhagen, the religious contingency is strong, and religious organizations with their young constituents have carried much of the weight on climate issues over the years. Moreover, the interreligious movement is getting a boost from young people, such as April Kunze of Interfaith Youth Core.

But there’s more than examples to back up the statement. There are numbers, too, courtesy of a report Pew released just two days after the Barna study. The study quantifies Barna’s hunch about the mainline’s ability to engage dialogue and embrace new models for faith expression and global understanding. "Large numbers of Americans," it reports, "engage in multiple religious practices, mixing elements of diverse traditions. Many say they attend worship services of more than one faith or denomination."

So what’s really been going on? Obviously, a lot more than the numbers are revealing. Faith, like everything else we try to capture with data, is dynamic. And ultimately elusive.

As in life, the only constant in faith is change. Thank goodness the numbers don’t tell us all. Faith deserves more.

— Martin Davis, December 11, 2009