{"id":1737,"date":"2012-08-01T14:06:54","date_gmt":"2012-08-01T21:06:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/gc2012\/?p=1737"},"modified":"2012-08-01T14:06:54","modified_gmt":"2012-08-01T21:06:54","slug":"this-article-is-about-numbers-and-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/this-article-is-about-numbers-and-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"This Article is about Numbers and Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Barbara Dadd Shaffer<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is about numbers and statistics. Items which you would think would be the concern of the conference statistician. But, no, they fall to the Conference Secretary to compute. He or she is expected to complete something called the Business of the Annual Conference or the\u201d BAC.\u201d It\u2019s in the Journal if you want to check it out. It includes lots of lists. For example, all retired clergy are listed by name. There are a couple questions which are really two charts of statistics. Having a head for figures and being married to that Conference Secretary, they fall to me. Several of them are really quite interesting. Here goes.<\/p>\n

The two charts are about our clergy and people leading congregations or working in agencies. One sorts out the number in various categories like local church pastors and extension ministries. The second chart sorts out the same people by gender and ethnicity.<\/p>\n

One good question to ask of the statistics is \u201cHow many women clergy do we have?\u201d<\/strong> And compared to the total number of clergy? Looking at the chart, it would appear that there really isn\u2019t that large a percentage of women clergy. Of the 470 clergy recorded in the charts, 155 or 33.2% are women. But we look around and see so many women. The chart separating out our clergy by gender includes all the retired clergy, too. Most of them are men (180 men and 33 women). And they tend to live a long time. It wasn\u2019t that long ago that essentially all of the clergy were male.<\/p>\n

If only the 257 active clergy are included, then the percentage (of female clergy) jumps to 51%.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you want to make the calculation only for elders, there are 196 of which 85 are women which is 43%. As a woman, I notice these percentages and I think they are really good. Dare I say, \u201cPretty darn good!\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to these 470 clergy described in the paragraph above and recorded in those two statistical charts, there are another 90 people who are not included. Members of other conferences or other denominations (34), diaconal ministers (9), lay persons assigned by the district superintendents (36) and retired local pastors (11). Also, several retired elders are working in our churches and agencies but not counted twice (23).<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the grand total? Active and retired, ordained and not. Add \u2018em all up and there are 560 men and women with an official relationship to our conference.<\/p>\n

Another question to ask of the statistics is \u201cWhat is the ethnic makeup of our conference?\u201d Of the 470 persons, 48 are ethnic minorities, a small 10%. When those retired clergy are taken out of the numbers, it improves a bit to 11.3% (29 out of 257). Of the retired clergy, the amazing number of 17 are Asian.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at the districts. The district with the most people under appointment is no surprise. The Seattle District with 60 people. Next is the Inland District with 54 and close behind is the Tacoma District with 50. Seven Rivers District has 45, followed by the Vancouver District with 37 and the Puget Sound District with 34.<\/p>\n

One interesting figure is the number of elders in each district. It\u2019s not necessarily proportional to the total number of people under appointment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The percentage ranges from 57% (Inland) to 77% (Seattle and Puget Sound); the overall average is 69%. Don\u2019t bother looking in the charts for these figures. They aren\u2019t there. I computed the figures by district so I could recount (something which happened too much) more easily on the way to giving the numbers to that special Conference Secretary in my life.<\/p>\n

What doesn\u2019t show in the 2012 charts are the changes from the previous year. The total number of persons (470) is up by 8 which is less than 2%. The number of retired people is stable (up 2). The number of elders increased by four as the number of provisional elders dropped by six. Retirements make up the difference. We retired fewer elders than we ordained and we commissioned fewer than we ordained. The biggest change is in the number of local pastors, both full time and part time. Up from 30 to 39. Quite a percentage increase (30%). I\u2019ll leave it to others to analyze the reasons for this.<\/p>\n

Who told you that statistics can be dry and uninteresting?<\/p>\n

Barbara Dadd Shaffer<\/strong><\/em>
\n Number one assistant to the conference secretary, soon to leave his position.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

744 words<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Barbara Dadd Shaffer This article is about numbers and statistics. Items which you would think would be the concern of the conference statistician. But, no, they fall to the Conference Secretary to compute. He or she is expected to complete something called the Business of the Annual Conference or the\u201d BAC.\u201d It\u2019s in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1739,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-conversation"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/abacus.jpg?fit=640%2C480&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2l75j-s1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1737"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1743,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1737\/revisions\/1743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pnwumc.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}