It's an odd world when something like ministry is quantified. Yet, it's done all the time.
I had an interesting conversation with someone this week who works at an institution that is primarily Catholic, but has numerous members who don't identify with any religion. Curiously, while most surveys usually include a "none" category for those who don't affiliate with any religion, this institution's categories include "Other" and "Unaffiliated." How these are different is anybody's guess. Are they different from a "none" category? Perhaps. It seems different to me to say you're "unaffiliated" rather than to identify with being called a "none." An unaffiliated person might be someone who has simply stopped attending religious services for a while, or who only attends with family members on occasion.
Still, if the survey doesn't tell you, the participant, what these categories mean, there is no chance that the participants meant the same thing when they filled it out. And this of course means that the participants are a very diverse group, who might or might not have things in common.
There might be a small percentage of the respondents who are unaffiliated because when they go to religious services, they are bored. This could be because the clergy and members aren't raising the bar so that the messages people hear in services are challenging; or it could be because the members and clergy lack a sense of reverence. Then again, there might be people who are unaffliated because they can't reconcile science and religion.
The list could go on and on. Where do you start, what do you grasp onto, when you want to understand something about why people are unaffiliated with official religions? It is like to trying to grasp onto a sand dune on a windy day; clouds of the sand blow away and shift, even as you are walking on them.
This is why it makes me incredulous to think that one might have to prove - in a quantifiable way- that the unaffliated need support and community in their search for meaning. And yet, imagine this: University X knows it has a larger unaffiliated population, but it resists putting resources towards this population... at least until it can be proven that this population will turn out for real, tangible events that require at least one person's - if not more than 1 person's- time to make happen. In essence, then, the search for meaning has to make it into the budget.
But how do you budget for something you have never seen before? When I make a budget, it's based on what I really spend on things I know I buy. I haven't even met the people in this group yet. At least, not directly. What next?
