The mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church is to call all people to become disciples of Jesus Christ, to proclaim the everlasting gospel embraced by the three angels’ message (Revelation 14:6-12), and to prepare the world for Christ’s soon return. The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Ghana carry out hundreds of evangelistic campaigns and activities every year. However, there is real-time insights derived and no centralized view of all these activities across conferences, districts, and local churches.
A REAL-TIME RESEARCH BASED FRAMEWORK FOR SDA CONFERENCES
Today’s churches are finding that it takes much more than pen, paper, and individual organizational skills to keep up with the needs of modern congregations and evangelistic support. Running an evangelistic campaign such as camp meeting is a significant task requiring efficiency and productivity; there are many factors to consider, and it can be hard to keep up. As the dynamic of modern evangelistic and church processes progresses, so does the use of technology within the church. With that comes the need for structured systems and functions explicitly tailored to the needs of conference management.
Evaluation has become a standard for church programming, to provide both evidence for improvement, recommendations and an assessment of program outcomes. Having a common evaluation tool across programs (in this case, camps) is beneficial in aggregating measurements and understanding similarities and differences between programs. The purpose of the project is to design a common framework (evaluation tool) for all camp meetings.
Though programs often vary from location to location, similar programming, especially camp meetings, share the same overall goals. As such, the church can benefit from utilizing the same evaluation tool to assess the effectiveness of our camp meetings.
Common evaluation tools allow us to make data comparisons across local, district, conference, and unions of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. When completed, the common evaluation tool can be used by the conference to ensure that all camp meeting programs are using a valid and reliable evaluation measure.
The Center for Research, Analytics, Technology and Evaluation (CRATE) seeks to provide a cross-functional approach that focuses on how the Conferences within the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Ghana can move forward with a data-driven approach. The purpose of CRATE is to promote the adoption of analytics across these conferences.
The Center seeks to design and implement processes related to predictive/analytical modeling, data mining, and research on large-scale, complex church data sets. The Center will use statistical analysis, graph modeling, text mining, and other analytical techniques from data gathering and conditioning to draw meaningful conclusions and results. The Center will collaborate with various internal and external teams within the conference and will provide periodic updates to stakeholders through presentations and research formulation.
the camp meeting research project
The camp meeting is one of the most important agencies in the work of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It is one of the most effective methods of arresting the attention of the people and reaching all classes with the gospel invitation.
The Center for Research, Analytics, Technology, and Evaluations (CRATE) partnered with the Central Ghana Conference of SDA Church to design a common framework for camp meeting evaluations. The framework was designed by CRATE based on the guidance provided by Ellen G. White as outlined in the Testimonies to the Church, Vol 6. p. 31-72.
WHAT ROLE DOES THE RESEARCH LEAD PLAY IN THE RESEARCH PROCESS?
Learn more about the eMinistry Research Portal here.