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Reflections of the St. Mark's Episcopal Community on Race
Survey Results

In undertaking the Race and Reconciliation project with St. Mark's Church, consultants JaNay Queen and Mark Brimhall believe that a good starting point is an inventory on how race is experienced in the church by its membership. What follows are the results of the recent parish-­wide survey. To understand the data, the consultants stress several factors:

  1. Because of the relatively few number of people of color in the church, breaking data down beyond the broader category of "people of color" is not possible. To do so runs the risk of identifying individuals. For example, some graphs used numbers while others use percentages. This makes trends visible with small numbers.

  2. The purpose of the data is not to generalize findings beyond what the respondents indicated. In other words, the data are not intended to be used to imagine what other churches might "look like," nor do the data indicate anything about people at St. Marks who did not participate. Instead, the goal is simply to provide the St. Marks community a reflective experience about what people in the congregation actually said/thought/believed about issues of race.

  3. Many of the areas of consideration in the inventory (climate, history, behavior, perspectives, confidence, etc.) came primarily from information from a focus group conducted in November 2009.

  4. The consultants use the lens of Multicultural Organizational Development (MCOD) which emphasizes the need to look at "outliers" in addition to majority trends to understand the full story of how people experience the general climate. In other words, it is equally important to consider the perspectives of people who do not represent the majority opinion as well as the perspectives of those people who do represent the majority. The reason for this "double vision" approach is to make sure that all people and perspectives are engaged in the conversation as the church community moves forward on issues of race. This is difficult to do, but is worth the effort in the end.

The powerpoint contains selected feedback from the questionnaire where a real story emerged. If the answers to a particular question are not in the powerpoint, it is ikely because no story emerged other than respondents had different opinions across race, gender, age, etc. without a significant amount of clustering by category.

It is also important to note that much of the results of the inventory provide starting points for the dialogues that will take place next.

Sincerely,
JaNay Queen, PhDc
Mark Brimhall-Vargas, PhDc

Shrine Mont Report

"Reaffirming the Legacy of Shrine Mont" -- a report of the committee established by the Vestry to provide a strategic assessment of Shrine Mont, the Annual Parish Planning Meeting. Accepted by the Vestry, March 2005.

Other Reports