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Question:
"What is CONTEXT?" |
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Context is a brief, easy-to-use planning resource
that presents you with important and comparable information about your community,
your congregation and your congregations programs and
ministries. Regardless of your data analysis experience or expertise, you can use
Context to develop a quick and accurate grasp of your congregations current ministry
environmenta critical part of any future planning effort. |
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Question:
"Where does the information in Context come from?" |
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There are two primary sources for information presented in
the Context report. Beginning on page three, Community information is provided by Percept,
a nationally recognized and respected research organization that specializes in gathering
and distributing census and other religious-oriented research information for churches.
Begining on page seven, information about your congregation is derived from an extensive
survey which was administered to your congregation and specially designed to gather data
in a format which can be easily compared to your community. |
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Question:
"How is Context organized?" |
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There are seven parts to Context, each designed to
address a critical planning question. |
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Part 1 - The Community
begins with the question: Who is out there? and provides a concise summary of
the extensive census and other data collected from your community.
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Part 2 - The Congregation
uses the congregational survey data to respond to the question: Who are we?
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Part 3 - The Comparison
reviews the first two parts and addresses the question: How do we differ from the
community?
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Part 4 - Program Ratings
returns to the congregational survey to focus on this question: How do we feel
about our congregations programs and ministries?
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Part 5 - Program Preferences
examines both the community and congregation to address the question: What do
people want from a church?
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Part 6 - Lifes
Satisfactions returns to the congregational survey and reports the results of
this question: In what areas of our lives do we feel satisfaction or discontent?
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Part 7 - Health & Wholeness
is a final comparison of the congregation and community and speaks to this question: In
what areas of their lives are people experiencing distress?
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When you have completed your review of Context, you will
not have the "final" answer to any of the above questions, but you will have a
solid foundation upon which to base further reflection, discussion and analysis. |
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Question:
"Our ministry environment is complex and multi-faceted. How can Context summarize it
in just a few pages?" |
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Studied in enough detail, every organizational environment
can seem incomprehensibly complex. However, if you hope to make competent decisions about
future direction, you must find a way to reduce the details (i.e., complexity) to a
manageable level. Clearly, the only way Context can assist you in this process is by
masking the many unnecessary details and focusing your attention on a smaller number of
important themes in a logical sequence. Percept refers to this approach as the Percept
Information Principle. |
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Question:
"What is the Percept Information Principle?" |
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The Percept Information Principles states that information
must answer the right planning question at the appropriate time for meaningful perceptions
to be formed. In any planning or reflection process, there is always more
information obtainable than your group can hope to make sense of. The challenge is to
gather and review the right information at the right time to develop accurate and useful
perceptions about your environment. |
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Question:
"So we need manageable detail, who decides what themes are in Context?" |
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For the past eight years, Percept has joined with over
15,000 local congregations and hundreds of church governing bodies to assist them in
better understanding their environmental context. By creatively using census and other
demographic data, custom research and local surveys, Percept has developed numerous tools
and methodologies that have proven themselves time and again to be the most effective
resources available for church planning and development. The GapThemes and Divergence
Analysis used in Context are examples of these tools. |
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Question:
"What is a GapTheme?" |
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A GapTheme is simply a piece of information which can be
easily compared between two groups such as a congregation and the community or between a
group and some "ideal" condition. For example, the overall education level of
the total population within the community can easily be compared to the education level of
your congregation. Doing so, you may discover that they are at similar levels or that one
is different from the other. This comparison is referred to as Divergence Analysis. |
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Click here to order a Context
(with ReVision) |
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