Fantastic form fillers!

Many people hate filling in forms, but evidently many of you do not! We enclosed a questionnaire for readers of Evangelicals Now with the May issue and invited you to fill it in and send it back to us.

914 people responded, which is something like 14% of our readership. I am told by statisticians that is very good for a survey of this type. Thank you very much to everyone who spent time participating.

We were expecting about half that number of forms to come back to us. So we were rather overwhelmed by the size of the job required to process the resulting data. That is why it has taken such a long time to give a report back in our pages.

About yourselves

71.2% of those who filled in the questionnaire were male and 28.7% female. But who are the EN readership? The survey gave us an interesting snapshot.

Well over half who replied live in England. EN obviously needs to do more to break into Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Denominationally we are a very mixed bunch. 38.6% of us are from Evangelical Free Churches, 30% are Baptists, 17% are Church of England and the rest a great mixture. These included Brethren, charismatic evangelical, Church of Scotland, Free Church of England, Free Church of Scotland, Countess of Huntingdon Connexion, Elim Pentecostal, 'New' churches, Methodist and more. This is very encouraging to us because we have always wanted EN to act as a force for unity among evangelicals. Surely gospel churches do need to stand together in some way speaking the gospel of God clearly to the nation.

The figures also tell us that we are mainly people over the age of 35, with quite a lot over the age of retirement. However, one wag, seeing the figures suggested that the statistics were rather skewed because retired people have more time to fill in questionnaires! I do not know if he is right. Some retired folk are extremely busy people, and I heard a reported remark from Jim Packer recently to the effect that 'retirement is a job for a younger man!' Over half the replies have come from people who have been Christians for over 30 years.

Our family status was also interesting. 76% of respondents are married, 14% single, 8% widowed and 2% divorced.

What you thought of EN

We asked you to give comments on the content of the paper. The replies in this section of the survey have given the EN staff both a lot of encouragement and at the same time a lot to think about.

First of all we were very gratified to find that 62% of the readers who responded find the newspaper helpful and 31% very helpful. Not only is it helpful, but it seems people like it. 56% found it enjoyable, and 41% very enjoyable. Praise God that EN is a source of strength and joy to God's people!

As we put news and articles together each month, we often wonder how much of the paper actually gets read by people. To our joy the survey told us that 65% of readers read the whole newspaper! 86% of readers spend over an hour reading through the paper each month and many over two hours. Around 80% of subscribers share their copy of EN with others to read.

Likes and dislikes

In the survey we split EN into its five component parts: UK news, overseas news, features, regular columns and book reviews We did not ask about music reviews and film reviews - perhaps we should have done that. On the whole 75% of people thought that all these areas were either good or very good. However, we are always keen to do what we can, within our means to improve. So we also asked for suggestions and possible changes.

When we asked which of the five areas you would like to be given more space the top candidates were UK news and features. 33.6% of people wanted more home news and 36.3% wanted more space given to features. 19.7% of people replying would like to see more column inches given to overseas news and 14.8% are after more book reviews. Only 7.7% of people wanted more regular columns.

Future directions

We also asked for specific replies about which topics you would like to see addressed by the feature articles in EN. Here we are still wading through the detailed replies. But some of the subjects raised have been: gossip, knotty problems from Scripture, pastoral authoritarianism, unity between evangelicals, how to be a 21st century church, impact of the EU on the religious scene, divorce and remarriage, women's issues, more news from ethnic churches, and social action outside the church. The list is indeed extremely long.

Although we have the youth leaders' column, one suggestion which has been raised is the idea of providing a 'taster' column for teenagers. We have mulled this over for many years, and will certainly give further thought to how we can go about it.

Some of the replies in this area were extremely specific. For example, 'What principles should guide the self-employed Christian builder faced with the complicated requirements of VAT?' I think we shall need some help on that one! Do pray for us as we try to get to grips with all this. Thanks again for your help.

What the EN Readers' Survey showed...

About yourselves

What you thought of EN

Likes and dislikes

Future directions

JEB

John Benton

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