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The annual Comparative Statistics bring to mind the vision of the prophet Amos who saw “a man standing by a wall with a plumb-line in his hand.” In the vision, the Lord asked Amos what he saw and sketched destructive consequences of Israel’s failure to learn from a plumb-line set “to the heart of my people.” These statistics are a plumb-line set to the heart of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Like the plumb-line, they do not tell the consequences of trends and patterns they measure and disclose. Discerning and responding in faith to those consequences is left to God’s people in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) whose heart is measured. There is of course no guarantee that we will get it right, any more than Israel got it right in the time of Jeroboam. (See Amos, chapter 7.)
Introductions to recent Comparative Statistics suggest a variety of approaches to discerning their plumb-line implications.
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