Yogi Berra, the famous baseball player and New York Yankee manager, once said, “Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical.” Let’s face it, we are all statistically challenged at times. What is important is knowing how statistics are useful, their limitations, and how to interpret them.

Statistics are useful in that they take a lot of information and condense that information so that helpful generalizations can be made. By definition, statistics do not tell the whole story because the whole story is far too complicated. The whole story must be summarized into comprehensible pieces of information in order for us to determine what is going on and how to respond.

Statistics have limitations. They do not tell us how we should interpret them. They often mask other important facets of a story. And statistics do not tell us if one thing caused something else. If we say that the population has grown 13% over the last 10 years we have condensed a lot of information into a helpful fact, but we do not know if this is good or bad. By itself, the statistic cannot be interpreted. We have also covered up other pieces of information like whether or not the African American population is growing faster than the average, or if New York City’s population change is keeping pace with the national average.

It would also be helpful if we knew something about the factors involved in producing a population growth of 13%. This means we need to know what increases (births, immigration, etc.) as well as what decreases the population (deaths, emigration, etc.). All of these factors will vary from location to location. Our understanding of the population is very limited if all we know is that the overall average increased by 13%.

Statistics can help us understand our complex society, but only if they are properly interpreted. Interpretation is accomplished by comparing one statistic with another. In the population example above we could interpret a meaning for 13% growth over the last 10 years if we had the same statistic for a number of decades with which to compare it. Or we could compare population change for African Americans, or for New York City, to the national average and draw some conclusions about these populations.

We might decide to compare our change in worship attendance to our local population change. If the two are the same, we could interpret that to mean our evangelism strategies have not helped us to further penetrate the population, and that we may have similar births, deaths, immigration and emigration patterns as the local population.

While comparing statistics will help us evaluate direction and tendencies, it is often very difficult to determine causation. Do churches grow when their pastors have long tenures? Or do pastors stay longer when their churches are growing? A conclusion either way should be made with humility and an openness to be proven wrong.

Allow God to focus your attention on a particular people or issue through statistics. The world is much too large and much too complex to understand when, where and how to provide ministry. Statistics will help you set a target for ministry and focus your prayer life. Statistics will help you set and evaluate goals. Statistics may even keep you humble before the Lord.

by Richard Houseal