|
Don't hide the fact that you are a United Methodist Church! Methodists have the HIGHEST POSITIVE RATINGS of religious and spiritual groups in the United States, new research by the Gallop Panel shows, ranking higher than Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Evangelicals or Fundamentalists.
Other new church starts may want to hide their denominational or para-church affiliations, and perhaps rightly so. You may have new church starts in your community who are only known as "The Living Church" or "The Family Church" or "First Church Memphis."
However, as United Methodists, if we want to be the most effective inviting new people to become Disciples of Jesus Christ for the Transformation of the World, we should proudly display the cross and flame, and the word Methodist, on all our signs, printing and marketing. With such a positive and winsome public image across the nation, why would any new United Methodist Church desire to hide its true identity?
In a telephone interview, Jim Griffith said, "United Methodist are one of the rare church bodies with a positive image. It's just a bad idea to keep your Methodist affiliation a secret." (www.griffithcoaching.com)
Only four percent of the United States population give Methodists a negative rating.
Ninety-six percent of the 1,005 persons (adults 18 and older) interviewed during the March 2008 poll, had either a positive or neutral view of Methodists. The survey used the broader category of Methodist rather than United Methodist.
Methodists are one of the four U.S. religious groups with strongly positive ratings. The others are Jews, Baptists and Catholics. Broader groups of "evangelical Christians" with 16 percent net positive and "fundamentalist Christians" with a 10 percent net positive did not fare as well, according to an analysis of the survey.
Methodists received the highest marks in the total positive and net positive categories of the survey of "Americans' Views of U.S. Religious and Spiritual Groups," with a 45 percent net positive rating. Forty seven percent of the respondents gave Methodists a "neutral" rating.
As a matter of comparison, Jews had a 42 percent net positive rating, Baptists 35 percent, and Catholics 32 percent.
The random, demographically weighted poll was conducted March 24-27, 2008, asking a representative sample of Americans whether they had a positive, negative, or neutral view of each of 10 spiritual or religious groups in the United States. The Gallop Panel is weighted so that it is demographically representative of the U.S. adult population. For results based on this sample, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
|