Borrowing from the World or being Strategic?

After a long hiatus I am back to my doctoral research.  There were a few times over the past year when I felt like giving up.  I am inspired by a college roommate who recently successfully defended his dissertation after long years and personal struggles.  He might not think he is an academic inspiration but he is. :-)

So what did I do on a mild Saturday morning beginning a week of vacation?  I met with one of my research congregations for a three hour visioning and operational structuring meeting.  Yes, it was a good meeting and I learned a lot.  Coincidentally, I have spent a lot of time recently engaged in workplace strategic planning processes.  Several of the processes and activities discussed in the church meeting were similar like SWOT analyses and Balanced Scorecards.  Secular strategic planning theory and practices are increasingly being used by church organizations, as well as theories about marketing, media, and communication.  These are not without controversy, and the churches I've met with who have taken this direction are very conscious that they are not businesses like Harvey's or The Bay, or even service groups like the Kiwanas.  They are very concerned with remaining faithful.

On the long bus ride home I had time to think about what might make a church process different from a corporate process.  I thought of three possible differences:

1. The meeting began with prayer.  At one critical junction someone asked "do we need to stop and pray before we vote." 
   
   I believe that my respondents saw this as more than a religious formality; they invited God into their process.  I've previously blogged about prayer in information seeking.  Whether you believe in the active involvement of a God in the activities of people (I do) or not, the participants in the churches I have studied do believe in it.  This will affect the process adding both weight (God is among us) and expectation (God leads us).
2.  A church is predominately a volunteer organization.
   
   Are paid employees more or less motivated to engage with the organizational vision than volunteer staff?  I think it would make a difference.  Larger churches do tend to have a number of salaried staff, but in few cases are these positions well paid.  They aren't there for the money; staff and volunteers are largely motivated by a sense of calling to the work of the organization.  Is the level of "buy-in" the same for corporations?
   
   
3. A vision rooted in faith is very powerful.
   
   Employees of corporate organizations may have strong service ethics, lofty ideals, and the desire to pursue excellence.  These would all inform their visioning and strategic planning.  But when a vision is rooted in one's personal faith how does that change things?  One of my former directors used to say when we would get riled about something "It is only a library, nobody will die."  She was not saying what we were doing was not important or necessary but that we had to put things into perspective.  By contrast when someone says they believe in the eternal spiritual results of the work of the church in people's lives, how does this re-shape how we view the guiding vision and planning of the church?  This certainly came through in the church meeting I attended.

This is worth exploring deeper, and I have a strategic planning trainer friend who will be getting a visit from me soon as I wrestle through this. :-)

As Dilbert is the final authority on strategic planning I will let him have the last word.  May none of our strategic planning processes be like this.

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When its personal...

Sometimes research can get personal. It happens when you find yourself joining your subjects under the microscope. At the recent CAIS conference I presented a paper entitled "Beyond Belief: Prayer as Communication in Information Seeking." I'll write about that later this week. It was a positive experience and I received lots of excellent feedback.

When you study peoples' lives, it is difficult to remain detached. The researcher balances the objective ("etic") viewpoint, and the "insider's" ("emic") perspective. When I study another culture, it is easier to keep my distance; when I study my own, I bring deeper insight but also my personal beliefs. In this paper I examined prayer as an information scientist. But I am a scientist who prays, and believes in prayer. I am prepared to accept critique of my research; my methods and my conclusions. But when someone questions my research subjects' belief in the reality of prayer it unsettles me. I share many of their beliefs. My faith is part of my identity.

I thought more about the challenges that some researchers face; those who regularly engage topics related to identity such as ethnicity, gender and belief. Engaging with your research; engaging with yourself. In public, and under the microscope. CAIS is a safe venue; I've been to conferences that weren't as civil. Yet some researchers regularly place themselves out there.

There is a balance to find here. I cannot become self-indulgent, lest my research really become only about me. I know researchers who have fallen into that trap. But we cannot be afraid to be personally engaged in our research either. There are of course safer topics to study.

In honour of the end of the Harry Potter franchise, here is a good professor scrap.

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Beyond Belief: Prayer as Communication

It is -12 degrees celsius outside, but I'm already planning for the summer. Conference season is coming soon and I have a few choices to make: CSIR conference at Kent State, CAIS at the Learneds in Freddie, or CLA in Halifax. I did send off one conference paper proposal; a paper on prayer as communication in information seeking. Prayer in the Christian tradition (Catholic and Protestant) is personal and relational; God hears our prayers and He responds.

So what does this have to do with information seeking? Canadian sociologist Reg Bibby has proposed that “…many Canadians…in the course of coping with life and death, reach out to a higher power – because it seems like the appropriate thing to do. Prayer seems to be our default mode.” (2002, Restless God, 158) We seek solace, encouragement, forgiveness and answers. So how does an information scientist investigate prayer? He cannot listen it on prayer's answer. She cannot empirically verify divine leading. Yet prayer is real to those praying. As real as reading books. As real as searching the internet. As real as talking to friends. Praying can be information seeking.

How then do we investigate prayer? By taking a sociological viewpoint; listening to our informants, and taking their experiences at face value. It doesn't mean that the researcher has to believe in prayer (I personally do). It means I will respect the beliefs of those who pray, and the answers they receive. Lots and lots of interesting information to consider! In the meantime I did discover the researcher's prayer. ;-)

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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? ;-)

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