A new Church Life survey is out this November, and churches are encouraged to get involved.

Church Life surveys have been held in 1997, 2002 and 2007. The aim is to provide churches of all denominations with data to understand trends, resourcing and changing patterns in Christian worship in New Zealand. The survey focuses more on the practices of church life than on personal faith.

It is based on an anonymous, 30-question survey from church-goers which tracks their background, their attitudes to church and community and their values. The survey compares this data with that from other churches across their denomination and in the same region.

The New Zealand Church Life Survey committee has representatives of several denominations and is linked with the New Zealand Christian Network.

The information is fed back to individual congregations, denominations and researchers. Associate Professor Peter Lineham and Dr Barry McDonald at Massey University have developed the use of this material for long-term studies of church life.

"Through new electronic means, it is very easy and cheap for all churches to participate. The real question is whether they will," says Professor Lineham.

"The simple fact is that numbers of churches using this and the various other survey materials have decreased across the last 15 years. In the old days there were strong national bodies that tended to direct local churches. These days many of these national structures are much looser. Also many local churches seem so busy on many fronts."

Committee member Rev Max Scott of St Margaret's Anglican Church in Hillsborough has developed a new approach to collecting data via web entry, which makes the rate for the participation of churches vastly cheaper if they enter their data and access reports online (with significant bulk discounts for denominations enrolling groups of parishes and congregations). He says that he can now generate reports more or less instantaneously once people have entered their data.

Details are online at http://clsnz.com/dp7. By clicking on the "reports" tab you can take data from the 2007 survey and do some interesting comparisons, such as what young people most like in a church service, or the average age of volunteers for church programmes.

"It will be very interesting to see what emerges about change in the 2011 survey compared to previous surveys," says Peter Lineham.

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