I've seen researchers pray for good data but...

what happens when prayer is your data? Not all the information used for church decision-making is easily measured or quantified. Take prayer for instance. Many church leaders regularly use prayer as an information seeking tool in determining the will of God for their churches. Is it really information seeking? Well consider this true story I recently heard:

Stoneridge Fellowship Church was faced with a dilemma. They were building a new facility and had already sold their existing property. There were unexpected construction delays and after a couple of extensions, the new owners wanted the keys to their building. Where does a congregation of 500 go to find a room? It sounds like the beginning of a joke but this was serious. They had two options: another area church offered the use of their building on Sunday afternoons, or they could use space in a local shopping mall. Obviously, the church offer had quite a list of pros. It was close to the existing structure and easily accessible. It was fully equipped and...well...it looked like a church! The mall would mean arriving at 6:00am on Sundays, trucking in all the equipment, setting up an auditorium and then taking it all down in time for mall opening at noon. Every week. And it certainly didn't look like a church. The cons greatly outweighed the pros. The leaders went away to think and pray. When they gathered again, they decided that though it didn't make sense, God wanted them to use the mall. What?!! But it doesn't even took like a church! They followed their divine information. It was a lot of early morning work. But they discovered something: Sunday worship was transformed from a spectator event to a community event. Everyone had to chip in. Setup and take-down crews were as essential as preachers and singers if this was going to work. They did it for months and met new people who came out to the church in the mall. It didn't look like church but it felt like it!

How does a researcher account for the impact of divine information; the role of prayer in the information seeking process? Whether you believe in prayer or not, the folks at Stoneridge Fellowship Church do and it is an essential part of their decision making process. Honest, authentic qualitative research must take that at face value. Now how does one put prayer into the data analysis software? ;-)