ServicesSurvey2015 - The Psalter

Survey on worship services 2015

ChurchCouncil is always considering the number, style and timing of worship services. It was suggested at the congregational meeting in March that Council again canvas the congregation on the question of reducing the number of services. In response to this request, concil composed a survey. The survey focuses on examining the diversity of members' worship style preferences, to see if combining of services is possible. Questions concerning which services to combine and at what times, are not yet being considered.

The survey can be completed in paper form available at church or here, or on the web using this link. Completion before the Council meeting on 28th April will be helpful.

The following graphs show the results of the numerical questions. The analysis of the "free form" questions will take longer. Currently we have received 101 surveys, made up of the following attendees.

22	Eight am
26	Nine fifteen
26	Eleven
6	Seven pm
3	other worship occasions

The first plot shows the average and standard deviation of the various questions."A sense of the holy" is the top performer. There may be different interpretations of what this means, and the spread of values is large, but it is clearly important to many people. Encouragingly, many of the features that are sometimes seen as contentious have mainly positive responses, including various music styles, use of electronic media, and the inclusion of children.
The 'sense of the holy' histogram shows this. The heights of the bars show the number of surveys that gave each score for this question. For 101 surveys, these can be read as the percentage of respondents.
It is also apparent from the averages plot that the worship time questions have large spreads. The plot to measure diversity of answers is shown opposite. Each question has a position on the graph, vertically the number of +3 ("only if..") answers, and horizontally the number of -3 ("not if..") answers. The overlapping questions are Organ & Weekly communion at 15 +3 answers, and Modern songs, Electronic meda & Printed orders at 8. Questions towards the middle of the plot show incompatible opinions. For example, the question about a time of 8am has 19 respondents who will only come at 8, and 17 who will never come at 8. Both 11am and 9am also have significant numbers of both extreme scores. Interestingly most of the other characteristics of services appear much less contentious so far.
This is confirmed by looking at the histogram for those questions, for example the 11am time slot shown opposite, with 13 "not if.."s (-3) and 8 "only if.."s(+3).
If we restrict this histogram to those who currently attend 9:15 or 11 (52 respondents), we find 8 (15%) who will only come at 11am (+3 for "Held at 11am") and 3 (6%) who will never come at 11 (-3 for the same question).
An alternative analysis is to sum the positive and negative scores for each question, shown opposite. Again, worship times dominate the points furthest from the axes, that is, the most contentious questions. Others such as band appear more significant, showing a large diversity of opinion, but without the extreme views that the time questions generated.
If this analysis is restricted to those currently attending 9:15 or 11 only, the plot opposite results. Evening, 8am and afternoon are commonly rejected (close to the negative axis), choirs and the organ are commonly accepted (close to the positive axis) but there are significant positive and negative scores for both 9am and 11am.

Analysis by DavidMorgan