Bibliographic record
Abstract
What is a healthy evangelical church? How do you measure church health? I begin this article by briefly examining various efforts to understand congregational vitality, beginning in the 1960s with the “church growth” movement, which gave way to an emphasis on “church health,” which in turn was replaced with an emphasis on “missional church.” Using the Canadian Evangelical Congregations Study (CECS), I then attempt to get at qualities of vital congregations. The CECS consisted of 50 face-to-face interviews with pastors from across Canada, and then 478 phone interviews with lead pastors in evangelical congregations in 2009. The response rate for these interviews was roughly 40%. The congregations were from five major evangelical denominations in Canada – Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (PAOC), the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), the Mennonite Brethren (MB), the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA), and the four Baptist Conventions: the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches, the Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec, the Canadian Baptists of Western Canada, and the French Baptist Union / Union d’Eglises Baptistes Francaises au Canada. (For more information about this study, see Reimer and Wilkinson, 2010.) With regard to church health, there was little agreement on what it is, or whether it can be measured at all. At the start of this project, we ask two respected theologians how to measure church health. This was their joint reply: Because the Church is the presence of the divine-human Christ on earth and His infinitely beautiful bride, it is impossible to measure her health. We are particularly concerned that theological categories not be taken over by (neutral) empirical measurements. These measurements lead us away from theological concerns and assume that we can find some other, neutral ground on the basis of which to measure the “health” of the Church. For example, we might be tempted to measure the health of the church by the presence or absence of a nursery, youth group, or hospitality committee. Each of these categories may be seen as transcending any theological viewpoints that exist (infant baptism or the meaning of the Eucharist). (Allert and Boersma, 2009)
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".