The change in computers in my lifetime has been nothing short of amazing. In my college years, computers consumed whole buildings and had power to process simple numbers and organize small databases. These days, I have more processing capability in my cell phone than in those monstrous computing rooms of the past. The laptop on which I write my blog each morning has multiple processors and applications for everything from word processing to video editing and much, much more. I remember a time, early in my career, when we used a manual typewriter at home and had just purchased an electric typewriter for the church, going to a church event and seeing a Kaypro II word processor. The suitcase-sided metal box weighed about 30#. You undid two industrial buckles to allow the keyboard to hinge down, revealing a couple of large floppy drives and a 6” screen that displayed green letters on a dark background. The person demonstrating the machine showed how you could edit text on screen (if you could remember all of the keyboard commands) and then produce a printed document with a very noisy dot-matrix printer. One floppy drive was used for the operating system of the computer, the other was available to hold your personal data. A single 5 1/4 floppy disk could hold 512 kilobytes of information - nearly a file drawer’s worth of information.

I was impressed.

These days my cell phone hold 64 gigabytes and my laptop has a terabyte - all in motion-free digital memory storage - no hard drive, just chips.

Back in the seventies, Susan worked for a short time at the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago (NORC). They had rooms full of computers that allowed them to process the information from opinion polls and do studies of what people thought. It was an impressive operation. I remember that the copy machine took up an entire room in the facility. They weren’t quite paperless in those days.

One of the results of this rapid increase in our abilities to process data is that certain parts of our society we’ve run rampant with studies. I received a survey from my car dealership about my “experience” with the last time I had the oil changed. I could fill it out on paper, online, or over the phone. I frequently receive calls on my home phone asking me to participate in political surveys. The receipt from the grocery store contains a code to participate in a survey. It seems like everyone is taking a survey every time I turn around.

Our United Church of Christ, despite shrinking budgets and reduced staff in our national setting, still maintains a research office. In fact the full-time staff person for research began her career in the UCC by taking a poll of congregations’ faith formation and Christian education programs. Now she works full time. Yesterday I spent a little over an hour filling out the latest multiple-page online survey of congregations. A huge amount of the data on the survey was information that the church already has. Worship attendance is reported in our annual reports. Racial and ethnic backgrounds of membership has already been reported. A full-page of the survey was a direct duplication of information we provided in the Christian Education survey.

But I took the time to fill out the survey because I know that the results will be incomplete. The busiest and most vital of our congregations will not be included in the survey because their pastors are too busy to fill out another set of forms for the church’s research office. These surveys are always skewed toward the bored and discontented. Those are the people who take time to fill them out.

Not that inaccurate information is a problem. It will take months and months of full time work for the research staff to prepare their report. The huge document will contain all kinds of statistics and committees will “ooh” and “awe” over them for several meetings. The surveys will then be put away and in a few years someone will say, “this data is all old and irrelevant” and throw the reports in the waste basket.

This isn’t the first survey I’ve seen in my time as a pastor.

The point is that all of this computing power enables us to collect not only useful information that can help us be more efficient in our ministries and serve our people better, but also data that is irrelevant and has no value. And it now takes a computer to separate the useful information from that which is useless.

Recently, in an informal conversation with a very dedicated and loyal church member, it was suggested that we might have an in-depth survey of our members to see what their concerns and needs were. The person proposed an anonymous survey that asked questions about what people want and how they envision the future of the church unfolding. My initial response was, “or, instead, we could just talk to people.”

I don’t put much faith in surveys. I have very little confidence in anonymous surveys. When people aren’t even willing to have their name associated with their opinion, their opinion must not mean much to them. What I didn’t say in the conversation is that I feel like we already know our congregation. I think common sense will tell us what is most important in most cases. Furthermore, the congregation is constantly changing. The average year sees enough funerals and enough new members to change the character of the congregation and the needs for programs and services.

The good news is that in addition to these amazing computers, we have human brains and human hearts to hold the prayers and concerns of our congregation. And we have a heritage of faith that teaches us that the best way to raise a concern or ask for a service is to “take it to God in prayer.”

I’ll probably fill out survey forms from time to time again. But when it comes to seeking direction for the future of the church, I’ll still put my faith in a gathering of people who talk to each other and pray together.

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