Why Reading Half a Graph Isn't Responsible Pastoral Leadership
Sunday afternoon I posted on Facebook that the morning's worship service from the 2018 session of the Missouri Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church was by far the most offensive and disturbing thing that I'd experienced all weekend. Several people asked questions about why that was. I'm getting around to answering them, but meanwhile, I want to mention a source used by the preacher, Rev. Jim Preisig. It's a 2015 story from the Washington Post about a Pew Research Center study showing projected worldwide religious trends through the year 2050. You can read the article for yourself here , and I'd encourage you to. It's not terribly long. I mention it because Rev. Preisig took part of a graph from the article as his starting point--the left graph from the set of graphs presented in the article, shown below. He took this graph, and the "nearly 40% growth" it showed (if you do the math, it's actually 34.56%), and pulled the followi...