Data and reality

People kept meeting a version of the Church that, on paper, was not the church they actually knew.

A minister still listed against a circuit – a local group of churches – that they left a year ago, so post keeps arriving for them. A church that was closed, carefully and often painfully, reappearing on a form as though no one had told the system. A building sold years ago, still shown on the public map of where to find us. A church that has reorganised and now meets on several sites, which the system cannot represent – so a church that plainly exists is told, in effect, that it does not.

"It's quicker to Google it"

The single most common frustration was our own website. People told us, again and again, that searching the Methodist website often does not find what they need – so they put their question into Google instead, with the word "Methodist" on the end, and let Google find the page our own search could not.

When a leader is asked, in public, what the Church has said about something – and cannot quickly find the answer on our own site – the Church's considered word is, in that moment, invisible.

What sits underneath

Behind these frustrations is a cause we can measure and it is not that we have lost track of things. We do hold sound records, in two places: a record that local churches, circuits and districts maintain themselves; and a central, connexional record. The trouble is that the two are not yet joined up. They were built separately, over many years, for different purposes, and were never designed to talk to each other – so a change made in one place doesn't reach the other, and the same fact can disagree from screen to screen.

This is no one's carelessness. It is what happens when an organisation grows over a long time and its records grow in pieces. But it has a real cost: when the information about the Church drifts away from the reality on the ground, someone local has to spend time putting it right – and sometimes a wrong record reopens something painful, like a closure.

The most visible example is our public church directory, Find a Church. It came through an entirely different source again - built separately, on the old website - and isn't yet linked to the records behind it, so what someone sees can be out of date even when the record we hold is correct.

Why it matters

Getting our data right is not a tidy-up job. It is the foundation for seeing the Church clearly – and for trusting what our own systems tell us. Almost everyone we spoke to had met this gap in person, which is why it matters so much.

Where this points

The honest first step is to join these records up – so a change made once is reflected everywhere it should be, and what the public sees matches what we hold. Get that right, and a great many smaller frustrations ease at the same time.