High intermarriage rates and declining immigration are changing how some Americans with Hispanic ancestry see their identity. Most U.S. adults with Hispanic ancestry self-identify as Hispanic, but 11%, or 5 million, do not.

Summary

Scott posed a question for everyone on the podcast to answer (then debate): what’s the one thing the church could or should do to make the biggest impact?

Scott’s opening response:  The one thing that the church in America has to work on to be more effective is being more authentic and more transparent in who they really are. America is rejecting the church more than it’s rejecting Jesus Christ.

When we ask Americans if they could worship alone or with their family, is that a valid replacement for regularly attending church, we find that the majority of Americans say, “Yes, we don’t need church.”

When we ask the un‑churched, “Has a Christian ever shared with them the benefits of participating in a local church?” only a third of them say somebody’s done that.

What people are rejecting is this notion that we were all taught to be holy, and the unwritten rule was to act like you are, even when you’re not. That’s what people are rejecting. They’re saying that’s not real, that’s not authentic.

What we’re failing to do is we’re failing to be a church for the hurting, because people don’t know that anybody’s hurting in church. We fail to be a church for the weak, because we always pretend that we’re strong. We’re failing to be a church for the struggling, because people don’t know we struggle too.

Casey’s opening response:  Yeah, so let me tell you the correct answer real fast…the correct answer to this question is Bible engagement and literacy, and we’ve talked a lot about on our show already, in previous episodes. We know that even among those who are affirming that the Bible is an authority over them, and that it’s God’s word, they’re still not regularly reading.

We’ve said only 49 percent of those with evangelical beliefs, those who are saying the Bible is the ultimate authority for what I believe, but still only half of those are engaging scripture in a systematic way.

That it’s not something that we’re currently doing well. Then, is it critical to the life and health of the church?

The only offensive weapon in the armor of God is the Word of God. We see Jesus use it to ward off temptation in the desert. We see His words are saturated with scripture, the high value that He places on scripture.

Lizette’s opening response: The one thing I would say the church can do ‑‑ and I’m going to focus on pastors ‑‑ is to simplify and do something. I’m going to give a framework for doing something.

It’s really going to be do anything, do any of these but get something done, and start moving forward.

First of all, step away from the ideas of grandiosity. Instead, think about what it takes to do and be faithful to God, and working out the most basic elements of being the church and being a disciple. It’s witness. It’s prayerful dependence, raising up new leaders, reaching out into the community.

I emphasize this going back to our study on transformational churches. When we were looking at where transformation was happening. The thing that always has stuck out to me is these churches that we ‑‑ based on several pieces of criteria ‑‑ put in the top 10 percent, it’s actually a very underwhelming set of criteria. It’s not this superhero kind of routine going on.

So, what are the other 90 percent doing? We’re so off track with focusing on the very basic things that need to be done. My suggestion is just get something done. Learn how to do something very basic. You know what these are. Then learn how to do this and work them out.

Richard Osmer has four tasks that he encourages the pastor to be able to do. It’s like a tool kit, a Swiss Army knife, if you will, that asks four questions. One, what is going on? Two, why is this going on? Three, what ought to be going on? And four, how might we respond?

Be sure to Tweet your questions and comments to us: @LifeWayResearch and individually: @smcconn, @statsguycasey, and @lizettebeard. Join us next time for another edition of Keep Asking.

Summary

Through a partnership with the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism (Wheaton College) and the Caskey Center for Church Excellence (NOBTS) to hear from 1,500 pastors in smaller evangelical and Black Protestant churches. When we say smaller, we’re talking 250 and less in attendance.

Wheaton’s Commitment to Evangelism through the Local Church
Dr. Richardson: We feel like God, in our day, is recapturing the church for God’s mission. It’s not that the church has a mission but God’s mission has the church. We’re also trying to collaborate with God, as I think God is recapturing mission with evangelism at the center.

A lot of churches, denominations, groups, have let evangelism sit to the side, so we have a huge passion for that getting restored. We’ve been doing research for some years now and writing on how the local church can reach the lost and have been very excited to see how God’s work on that and what God’s taught us.

We aren’t just interested in research. We’re actually interested in helping churches put it into practice. We run cohort for senior pastors to help them lead their churches into effective outreach.

A lot of research and a lot of publicity has gone to larger churches and how they’re reaching people and those churches have had the resources to write block and develop materials and have conferences at their churches and so forth.

The whole issue of smaller churches and how they effectively reach out, there’s not been nearly as much written on that, not been near as much research, so we really wanted to fill that niche because in actuality, when you look at the landscape, over half the people who are in church in our country are in churches under 400 and a majority of the churches in our country are churches under 200 or so. We, somewhat arbitrarily, chose 250, but that’s the majority of churches, nearly half the people in church and those churches are not getting resourced.

Key Insights from the study:
Dr. Richardson:  We have our top 10 reasons small churches grow through conversion. Just to clarify, what we looked at was new commitments to Jesus’ savior, number of new commitments per the number of people attending who were retained because our concern is not just collecting decisions but making disciples.

We got two predictive factors, factor 10 and then, factor 6. These are in order of priority, in order of impact, factor 10 and factor 6.

Factor 10 is this ‑‑ the pastor more frequently blocks out time in the calendar for the purpose of sharing the gospel with non‑Christians. Basically, if the pastor’s not leading it and not living it, the way the pastor needs to start is by living it. They block out time in their calendar.

The factor that’s even more predictive is that the pastor hears that his people are reaching out, the people in the church are reaching out.

Be sure to Tweet your questions and comments to us: @LifeWayResearch and individually: @smcconn, @statsguycasey, and @lizettebeard. Join us next time for another edition of Keep Asking.

Rick Richardson is Professor of Evangelism and Leadership at Wheaton College and the Director of the Masters in Evangelism and Leadership and the Masters in Missional Church Movements degrees. He is also a Graduate Faculty Scholar with the Billy Graham Center of Evangelism. In that role, Rick directs Evangelizing Churches, a pastor cohort coaching, resourcing and research arm of the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism that serves and equips local churches for witness.

Summary

Car Buying and the Research Project
Casey shares from his own recent personal experience of walking through the research process for buying a car. He identified three key takeaways that apply to research of any size.

1. One thing was just to prioritize what do I actually need and want out of this car and what don’t I need. You could wind up talking yourself into to paying for things that you’re never going to use.

1. Be patient and don’t settle. Once you know those priorities, you can be specific in the criteria you’re looking for. You see a list of 10 of them on a website. Maybe all of them aren’t exactly what you’re looking for, but that’s not the only website that exists. Also, cars are coming and going at various times too. With a little time, you will get a general idea of how common it is to find vehicles for sale with the list of features you’ve decided on and what a vehicle with those features should probably cost.
2. Trust the experts. You can get into this place, “How do I know that it’s not just going to fall apart afterwards?” I’m buying this thing and maybe it’s priced well, because of…You start filling in the blanks with terrible things. I brought it in for a pre‑purchase inspection. It cost $60 to do that. Things that they found, that $60 payment versus finding out later there are things that I didn’t account for, that I wasn’t really paying attention to or knowing to look for even and then having that go poorly. It’s investing in finding somebody’s opinion, who knows more than I do, to start with.

Research is more than just collecting information
Research is a process that we all do. Researching a possible vacation, researching purchasing a new product, we all do it to learn to move forward.

Research is more than just collecting information everybody else has gathered and rearranging it. It’s collecting it and making a decision and acting on it or letting that information shape more information that gets acted on.

Who Needs the Research
A key part in thinking about research is thinking about who’s going to use the findings, who cares about the problem.

But research projects and research questions should be set up in such a way as to help have meaningful data analysis on the back end of it. That can be a hard question to answer sometimes. But that’s an important question to be asking beforehand.

What Students Should Ask
As a student’s approaching it, the question they need to ask is, “What is the one thing that I can add to the scholarship in this area?” Pretty much any major work, dissertation type level work, they’re going to need to do that background research to see what has already been done.

From that, they need to be thinking, “What’s the one thing I can add to this? I may take somebody else’s hypothesis or future research idea and actually test it. I might be the one exploring and setting somebody else up to come back behind me and test it. What’s the one thing I can add?”

What Organizations Should Ask
In a business setting, in a ministry setting it’s not that different. There, the past scholarship isn’t published papers in most cases. But it’s other research that’s been done. Its internal metrics that you have and the feedback that you’re getting in your normal feedback loops.

You’re trying to say, “I need to add something to that, to make this decision I’ve got coming up or series of decisions. I don’t feel like my current set of data is enough. What’s the one thing? What’s the main thing that I need to know, to really get to the point of making a good decision?”

Be sure to Tweet your questions and comments to us: @LifeWayResearch and individually: @smcconn, @statsguycasey, and @lizettebeard. Join us next time for another edition of Keep Asking.

Summary

Sponsors
The Billy Graham Center for Evangelism at Wheaton and the Caskey Center for Church Excellence in New Orleans, are both attentive to things that can help the church, and particularly in this case, evangelism, the desire was to focus on smaller churches.

How Big is Small?
You have to draw the line somewhere in defining, “What are we going to call smaller?” In this case, it was worship attendance of 250 or less. For many who are listening, they’d say, “Wow, that still includes some pretty good‑sized churches.

But at the same time, it does definitely get out of there, the megachurches and large churches that do have a lot of attendees and oftentimes can catch all the attention in the magazine articles and the illustrations that we see day to day.

Hopeful Insights
Just on average, these churches, they’re seeing 12 new people make new commitments to Christ each year. The pastors themselves, most of them are reporting that they’re modeling evangelism in their church. We see that three out of four are saying that their attempting each week to try to share their faith, so if the pastor’s out there modeling this kind of behavior, to me, that’s a very healthy sign.

What Makes the Difference
If I were going to look at, among those that are doing really well ‑‑ 11.7 or more retained new commitments per 100 attendees ‑‑ versus the ones who are doing average or below, so the bottom 50 percent by that measure, of less than 5.6 retained new commitments per 100 attendees.

If I were going to compare those two groups, we see them different in several ways. One of them is their interactions with the unchurched, which portions of this are probably more controllable than others, but more evangelistically effective churches, by the measure we just talked about, are more likely to be comprised of previously unchurched attendees.

Forty-seven percent of evangelistically effective churches have a high percentage of unchurched attendees, 30 percent or more unchurched, compared to 27 percent of less effective churches, so 47 versus 27.

Additionally, those pastors are more often hearing feedback that they are strong at communicating with unchurched people in their worship services. That’s one dimension that we noticed popping out, was that interaction with the unchurched.

Be sure to Tweet your questions and comments to us: @LifeWayResearch and individually: @smcconn, @statsguycasey, and @lizettebeard. Join us next time for another edition of Keep Asking.

See also
When It Comes to Evangelism, the Small Things Really Matter by LifeWay Research

Summary

The Donor Experience
The donor experience is a very large field in academia and in other areas. What ministries, especially, need most is to understand their donors’ attitudes, behaviors, who else that they’re giving to.

Most organizations today don’t have a good grasp on who their donors are. They presume a lot. That donors love them, and want to support them, and that there’s a higher priority for them versus other charities that they support. I don’t think there’s a good communication exchange between ministries and their donors.

Why do non-profits struggle to know their donors
Mostly, a lot of these charities are filled with people with ministry backgrounds. They don’t have that kind of education to understand the customer dynamic, which is basically the same because people, as they spend money on different brands and products, they spend money on different charities.

Previous research shows that most donors are giving to about five charities at the same time during a year. The research also suggests that there’s a priority. Some are more important than others. That creates erratic giving patterns where you might support one charity constantly every month, but then another charity every other year.

[08:53] I think ministries, internally look at that and say, especially for the ones that are giving every other year, “Why?” They target that situation with they’re not saying the right thing in their appeal letter or they’re not marketing to them enough. In actuality, it’s just you’re not as important as the other charities that I’m supporting. it’s more of an internal decision.

How does research help non-profits?
Q: As a ministry tries to find new donors, that quest for new people to support their ministry, how can research help with that? How is that not just a direct marketing effort or just telling their message in new places? What does research add to that?

A: If every ministry had the means, then I think that it’s just common sense. They should be communicating, facilitating some kind of dialog with their donors and understanding more about where their ministry fits in amongst other ministries and charities that they support.

An answer to that is there needs to be some kind of, again I’ll bring it to the real world, customer feedback program that’s ongoing, where you’re constantly having a dialog with your donors and understanding how they perceive you in juxtaposition against other charities that they’re supporting.

Be sure to Tweet your questions and comments to us: @LifeWayResearch and individually: @smcconn, @statsguycasey, and @lizettebeard. Join us next time for another edition of Keep Asking.

John Theodore serves as Project Manager with LifeWay Research. John has been leading consumer insights research for nearly two decades, having experience in both the profit and nonprofit worlds. His passion is discovering the keys to successful relationships between customers and the brands they value.

A look back at the events that defined 2017 and what public opinion can tell us about the important trends shaping American society.

Today we launch the results of McCrindle's latest analysis into Australia’s dynamic mid-market, commissioned by BDO Australia.

In our research, we discovered that the mid-market is a mystery. People seem to understand what small business is and even big-business – but the middle market is less defined. To be clear, this is where the action is. These are growing businesses, dynamic, fast-moving, entrepreneurial in nature, exploring new regions and new markets, and embracing technology.

Defining the mid-market

There is a lack of clear consensus as to what counts as the ‘middle’ and how to define the ‘market’. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), for example, defines medium sized businesses as those who employ between 20 and 200 employees. Based on employment size, there are 51,024 medium sized businesses in Australia, and these medium sized businesses account for just 2% of the 2.2 million businesses recorded by the ABS.

For the purpose of the research, we define the Australian middle market as businesses with an annual turnover between $10 million and $250 million. This definition is based on data used by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Their definitions divide Australian businesses into seven size categories that range from ‘loss’ on the lowest end of the spectrum to ‘very large’ on the highest end. Businesses earning between $10 million and $250 million are defined as being ‘medium to large’ in size. Businesses in this category contribute close to one fifth of net tax (18% - almost $13b to the Australian economy, and produce nearly a quarter of Australia’s total revenue (23%; $645bn).

It is clearly a misunderstood space – so at McCrindle we have assisted BDO with the data to better understand the mid-market, and spoken with senior executives from mid-market companies to understand the challenges they face in the current business landscape.

Opportunities for the mid-market

Leaders in the mid-market face opportunities and challenges uniquely connected to their business size.

In a changing economic market, middle market players have the advantage of being nimble and agile, not subject to hierarchal structures in the way larger companies are. They are strongly focused on innovation. For leaders in the middle market, innovation has moved away from just being about the product to the systems and processes through which the product reaches the consumer. Business leaders see technology as a key way to adapt in a world of digitalisation, particularly internal technological innovations. They also recognise the challenge of securing suitably skilled talent to continue to drive growth in their businesses.

To read further, access the full report here.

GET IN TOUCH

For more information on our research and visualisation services, please feel free to check out our Research Pack, or get in touch!

P: 02 8824 3422

E: info@mccrindle.com.au

Nearly a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, a majority of Americans (60%) say his election has led to worse race relations in the United States.

Americans are far more likely to say there are strong conflicts between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. today than to say the same for other groups.

While drones have become more prevalent, many Americans have reservations about where and under what circumstances their use should be allowed.

Merry Christmas, Australia!

Especially to the 305,377 new-born Australians experiencing their first Christmas and the 6,268 enjoying their 100th (or more) Christmas!

We hope you enjoy unwrapping the technological, experiences, and jewellery gifts you are hoping for this year. Enjoy decorating your Christmas tree, which would be over 8 million Christmas trees if every household in Australia have one! 

From all of us at McCrindle we hope you enjoy the infographic we have put together, and that amidst the busyness of the season you have time to connect with family and friends, reflect on the Christmas story and enjoy the many things that make this country great.

Have a Merry Christmas, and a fantastic 2018!

- The McCrindle Team

More Americans say it's good to steer girls toward boy-oriented toys and activities than say boys should be encouraged to play with girl-oriented toys.

Political divides in the American news landscape do not end with Americans’ preferences for different news sources; rather, they extend to how members of the U.S. Congress communicate with constituents in the digital age.

Read five facts about Christmas in America and how people celebrate the holiday.

Our recent survey of 1,002 Australians revealed that while there is the annual debate about the Christmas story in a religiously diverse society, Australians don’t want to lose the true meaning of Christmas.

Our annual research on best/worst gifts, reveals technology is still voted the best gift to receive and novelty/decorative items once again are the least desired.

True meaning of Christmas still a strong sentiment

Over four in five Australians (85%) prefer the traditional greeting of “Merry Christmas” compared to more neutral salutations, “Season’s Greetings” (8%) and “Happy Holidays” (7%).

Although there are sometimes debates around whether the Christmas Story should be shared, nine in ten Australians (91%) support nativity scenes in public spaces. While a further 9% of Australians indicated shopping centres and local councils, to some extent, should not display these decorations.

Religious insights

Despite practising a religion other than Christianity or having no religious beliefs, Australians still are happy to see a nativity scene in public spaces (religion other than Christianity, 91% and no religion, 86%).

Generational insights

The older generations, Generation X, Baby Boomers and Builders, are more likely to prefer the more traditional Christmas greeting “Merry Christmas” compared to the younger generations, Generation Z & Y (87% cf. 81%).

The best gifts… and the worst

With so many new and exciting gadgets coming out every year, it is no surprise that nine in ten Australians (90%) rate it as the best gift or they wouldn’t mind receiving it. Experiences remain high on the list at number two for over four in five Aussie’s wish list (83%). Jewellery comes in at number three with just under three quarters of Australians (74%) indicating it would be the best gift or they wouldn’t mind receiving it.

On the other hand, novelty gifts are rated the worst gift, with almost three in five Australians (57%) indicating they wouldn’t like to receive it or it would be the worst gift… ouch! Ornaments and decorative items come in second last, with over half (54%) stating they wouldn’t like to receive it or it would be the worst gift.

For Aussie women, their top three rated ‘best gifts’ are experiences (36%), technology (35%) and jewellery (29%). For Aussie men, their top three rated ‘best gifts’ are technology (37%), experiences (17%) and food gifts (16%).

Generational Insights

Although technology is perceived to only be enjoyed by the younger generations, the research reveals technology is actually the number one ‘best gift’ across all generations.

Experiences are rated second across all generations, except the Builders Generation (aged over 72), where a food gift is considered to be the best gift. Download the full media release here About this study

This research was conducted by McCrindle in November 2017 based on a nationwide study of 1,002 respondents.

For media commentary or enquiries, please contact Kimberley Linco at kim@mccrindle.com.au or via 02 8824 3422.

About four-in-ten working U.S. women say they have faced discrimination on the job because of their gender. They report a broad array of personal experiences.

Since 2015, opinions about the federal government’s handling of several major issues have become less positive and much more partisan.

Foreign-owned companies employed 6.8 million workers in the United States in 2015, up 22% from 2007. Overall, foreign-owned companies accounted for 5.5% of all U.S. private sector employment in 2015.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the numbers reveal Perth, Adelaide and Canberra have the best chance of perfect weather on December 25th! 
 
The historical data reveals that all three cities are likely to have an average temperature in the high 20s and less than 20% chance of rain.
 
On the other end of the spectrum, Darwin has the highest chance of rain and a sweltering average of

32.3ºC.

From all of us at McCrindle, we wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas a safe and happy New Year!