Response to Iannaccone: Is There a Method to This Madness?

Abstract

After reading Reassessing Church Growth: Statistical Pitfalls and their Consequences one is likely to conclude that past efforts to understand the correlates and causes of congregational growth were part of a conspiracy to disprove Dean Kelley's (1972) explanation of why churches grow. The only possible alternative is that past church growth research was methodologically flawed and logically inconsistent, and that these shortcomings produced an underestimation of the importance of the variable that Dean Kelley, Laurence lannaccone, and all supply-side sociologists hold most dear: organizational strictness. Of course, one can also propose a counterconspiracy theory that Reassessing Church Growth is not really an effort to address weaknesses in church growth research; that it is, instead, a notso-subtle effort to promote a particular version of rational choice theory without having to present any data which supports it directly. Due to limited space we focus on two issues: 1) Iannaccone's Pitfall 1 (his analysis of growth among simulated churches); and 2) logical problems with strictness as the basis for a theory of church growth. Brief comments about the other pitfalls are reserved for a final few paragraphs.