My publishing of the yearbook stats by classis prompted someone from another forum to ask me about aligning that with other data, like denominational ministry share contributions by classis. Rather than contact all of the stated clerks in the denom I wondered if the denominational office has these figures and so I made the request. It got me thinking about information in the CRC and how we should be thinking about it. This prompted me to write this about some biases I have.

Within this are of course some biases of mine about information, community and the church.

1. I think the church should have a bias towards openness with respect to information because it helps breed trust. I expect that my congregation openly reports to any member or visitor the monthly finance report of our congregation. They can see how much money I make and where their offerings go. There are exceptions of course, mainly benevolence distributions. I think even though openness can sometimes leave someone open to criticism in the long term it is helpful for community.

2. Membership decline and its impact on the ministry share system is a public concern for the CRC. It is talked about openly, discussed, and fear involving it has shaped a lot of conversation and policy. I don’t think the fear is a good thing and I think good information and a posture towards openness reduces fear. I also believe that in this digital age the kinds of conversations that make up the community of the CRC are happening online. CRC-Voices has been around a while and is still an excellent place to find CRC discussions. Now on Facebook and on the CRC Network discussion is happening. As the CRC is not as tied together by family networks these new networks are important. For that reason I think the CRC needs to continue to work on publishing information like this to foster discussion, and discussion based on hard data, not anecdotal hunches, which is what we usually do in the absence of harder numbers.

3. I recognize that it is not good stewardship of denominational resources to publish every conceivable aspect of public information for the curiosity of some odd church member and so I’m not trying to make extra work. At the same time I think it is important to publish as much as we can. This is why we publish financial information in our Acts and Agenda. We want openness. It may be that the vast majority of people simply glaze over it, but there are church wonks who pour over yearbook stats every year, and try to track down other information to try to gain a more accurate picture of what is happening in the broader church. What drives them is the leadership drive and a desire to exercise stewardship over our communion. It’s my desire that the Denominational office might have an openness policy to publish information that could be helpful in this work of the church. I think the denominational website is excellent and has a lot of good information already. I think we could make it better.

The standard should be 1. is it already public knowledge/information and 2. is it easy (sharing an excel spreadsheet for example) to share? If the answer is “yes” to both of them I think it’s in the best interest of the church to both positively respond to the request and in fact have the denomination post the data on its own site.

pvk