From Sampler to Sower

Monday I shared a survey I prepared to help me get a grasp on how well my teens understood some of the most basic tenets of Christianity.

Yesterday we started looking at the five questions in which student’s responses diverged the most from my own.

Today I’d like to continue looking the results from our beliefs survey, continuing to move from the questions where student opinion diverged the most, to those in which they were most aligned with my own.

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Note: If you’re from MCON and have any interest in taking the survey yourself, please don’t read any farther until after you take the survey to avoid skewing your responses.

Yesterday I shared the Basic Beliefs survey that I asked students in our youth ministry to complete in order to investigate their understanding of some central tenets of Christianity.  The purpose was one part evaluative (has anything I’ve taught stuck?) and three parts prescriptive (going forward, what topics need special attention?).

Today I’d like to start looking at some of the results.

Methodological Concerns

Before diving into particular questions I would like to offer a couple of caveats.  First and foremost, let’s face it, taking tests isn’t most students’ idea of a fun night at youth group. Couple a students distaste for testing with the total lack of consequences for carelessness in taking this survey, and one must wonder “Did my students think through any of these questions carefully enough to answer what they really believe?”

Complicating that issue is the fact that in the interest of brevity, this survey lacks the kind of redundancy necessary to evaluate just how indicative of true beliefs the responses really are. I didn’t have time to ask each question three different ways so that I could compare how consistent any given respondent’s answers were.

And compounding all those concerns is the fact that I am by no means a trained pollster. I tried to be careful to make sure my responses did not reflect a bias one way or another, but the question remains just how effectively I accomplished that goal.

So, keeping in mind those weaknesses to this survey, let’s look at the results…

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Not long ago I was sitting in a sermon-slash-lecture presented by a local educator to a group of pastors from our community.  He was arguing that private Christian education is vitally important not only to the intellectual, but also to the spiritual development of our students. He mentioned some beliefs central to the Christian faith and cited research that showed such seemingly basic beliefs are no longer widely held among American youth.

And that got me thinking…

Just how well do my students understand the basic tenets of Christianity?

And so the survey was born.

Last Wednesday night I asked the students at our midweek service to take our Basic Beliefs survey.  I explained up front that this wasn’t a test.  Unlike tests, this obviously wasn’t for a grade.  And unlike tests, it wasn’t as if every question only had one right answer. That’s not to suggest there are no wrong answers on the survey, but in cases where there were more than one answer that could be correct, they were to choose the answer that best matched their understanding. The point was to help me understand how they viewed various aspects of theology, not to see if they could find the one right answer.

20 questions total. 16 drawn from topics covered by the Articles of Faith and the Agreed Statement of Belief for the Church of the Nazarene. (Incidentally, this school year I taught on each and every one of these subjects at Water’s Edge. So for those who have been a part of our program throughout the school year, these should be familiar subjects.) Four are demographic, dealing with age group, length of time involved in Water’s Edge, frequency of attendance, and the involvement in other religious activities at the church.

Today I’ll share the survey with you. Tomorrow we’ll begin looking at some of the results from my group, Wednesday we’ll wrap up the review of the results, and Thursday we’ll see if there’s anything we can learn from all this.

You can download a pdf version of the survey here, or check out the questions and answers after the jump.

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You may have noticed I suddenly went from a post every week day to a week and a half of nothing.  It was family vacation time.  Our oldest son is in eighth grade, so the Buhro academy took an extended field trip to Niagara Falls and Washington, DC.  I tried to work ahead a cue some posts for while I was gone, but there simply wasn’t enough time, so you got nothing. But we’re back, and I’m ready and eager to start writing again.  In case you’re interested, here’s a video of the photos from our trip.  Individual photos can be viewed on Flickr.  The video itself was made with Animoto, and I continue to strongly recommend it for those in ministry. It’s a great way to showcase photos from your church.