What we discovered by taking time to get as many observations and then sifting through the interpretations is that although we had diminishing worship attendance, we didn’t have a worship service problem but were still right in the middle of a larger challenge we had been working on for five years. We also found that some of our other assumptions (“the church is declining because of denominational turmoil” or “People aren’t coming because Tod is preaching a bit less” or “The congregation is getting tired of Tod’s voice”) didn’t really have data to support them.
