Church Innovations' Research
More About Ethnographic Research

Church Innovations uses ethnographic research, or community interviewing, to qualitatively gather the thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and hopes of a community. After establishing an atmosphere of trust, confidentiality and impartiality, the interviewer, who we call a Listening Leader, uses a set of questions to encourage an interviewee to recall moments of talking, deciding, and acting in the congregation's life.

The interviewee's answers to these questions are:

1. listened to carefully,
2. summarized without taking away the essence of the answer, and
3. verified by the interviewee to be sure the summary is accurate and contains all the essential information.

The person supplying the information should feel important and in control. That person holds the needed information to understand a community's past and present as well as what is needed to work toward God’s promised and preferred future.

This method is far more instructive and revealing than having the interviewee fill out a survey form. Involvement and influence in churches often take the shape of circles within circles. Over the years this common concentric circle shape has become known as the Family Home Model. The innermost circle is considered the family, a group of 20-30 persons, who may or may not be elected leaders, who influence most decisions by their very presence or absence at meetings, their opinions on issues, and their relationships. The next ring, much larger, is made up of inside strangers, a group of dozens of people who attend quite regularly, usually contribute money regularly, and who know one another by sight but often not by name. The outermost circle, often a narrow band around the other two, is made up of outside strangers, the group at the edge of church life. They know, you know, everybody knows that they don’t quite belong, but they have some affiliation, often by marriage or by belonging to some group in the congregation.

Ideally, the Listening Leader Team will select 24 persons to interview. Those 24 should be distributed over the circles in this way: 6 from the family, 12 from the inside strangers, and 6 from the outside strangers.

Why not just interview family members? After all, they are the ones “in the know.” Here’s why: Most people already know what the family members think and feel and remember and hope; it is critical to capture their vision in this process. Not as many people know what the inside strangers think and feel and remember and hope, and there are three to four times as many of them at the very least. This inside stranger group holds the key to the next stages of visioning for mission. Their energy and gifts will be what helps the congregation to move in new directions, so it is very important to invite them into the process as early as possible and learn what they know. And last but certainly not least, the outside strangers are almost never heard from, yet they see with outsider vision what the congregation looks and acts like. They will have the eyes of the person who is not yet served by the congregation, some of the very people God is sending the church to serve in mission. So your team must do its best to gather interviews from across all three groups in about a 1-2-1 ratio.

With Listening Leaders facilitating the interviews, we are able to clarify and confirm the information that’s been gathered. The interviewer can read the summary to the interviewee and verify that the intended meaning was understood. In this way, the summaries can be substantiated and elaborated upon by the interviewee for complete clarity.

Good ethnographic interview questions always have two components:

1. A very open-ended nature. They are headed in some direction, but they’re not driving or pushing or leading. They ask the interviewee to tell stories and be descriptive. They give the interviewer an opportunity to be surprised by the answers. That is one of the main jobs of the ethnographer: to be surprised.
2. A progression from surface level to delving deeper, asking for clarification when needed. The interviewer is after the interviewee’s true perceptions. Rather than providing feedback or opinions of the interviewee’s comments, the interviewer moves ahead for more understanding.

Good ethnographers always try to:

• build trust and rapport
• show non-judgmental respect
• display attentiveness
• create a sense of partnership
• encourage spontaneity
• put the interviewee in charge

When applied ethnographic interviews are conducted this way, they reveal the heart of the community. The resulting written report that is compiled by a CI-trained group of outsiders is tested for reliability by sharing it with the original Listening Leaders,, bringing the stories full circle and modeling solid research methodology that gives us accurate stories and insights while building trust in the community.

We use this Applied Ethnographic research approach in much of our work with congregations to capture the narrative story and current situation of the congregations as we help them discern the hopes and dreams for their future.

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