Reassessing Church Growth: Statistical Pitfalls and Their Consequences

Abstract

Studies of church growth have fallen prey to numerous statistical pitfalls. Flawed methods and inadequate data have reduced the predictive power of past research while systematically biasing its results. The biases work to overstate the importance of the demographic context in which a church exists and understate the importance of the church's own institutional characteristics, such as organizational strictness. This paper uses theory, simulations, and data reanalysis to explore the empirical difficulties confronting church growth research and to reassess the role of strictness. © Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1996.