Sunday, March 04, 2007

Final Statistics

To end this statistical tirade I will post the rest of the results
We surveyed
114 teens at the 30 Hour Famine...

Bible Statistics
35 knew that the Bible contains 66 books
25 knew there are 39 books in the O.T.
28 knew there were 27 books in the N.T.
34 knew Malachi is the last book of the O.T.
70 knew Revelation is the last book of the NT
Analysis: I found these numbers acceptable

Teens and the Ten Commandments
(They were asked to fill in blanks)
99 knew the first commandment
74 knew the third commandment
(18 put "don't misuse God's WORD)
104 knew the fourth commandment
22 knew the eighth commandment
(29 guess 'murder,' 17 said 'sin')
Analysis: For the most part, they seemed to know the commandments, just not in the right order.

The Name Game
(asked to name 3 in each category)
1. People in Genesis: 55% of blanks correct
2. People who knew Moses: 33%
3. Old Testament Kings: 38%
4. Old Testmanet Prophets: 16%
5. New Testament Apostles: 28%
6. New Testament Authors: 53%
7. The Trinity: 55%
Analysis: They didn't do very well on this section considering there were so many names to choose from in most categories. Especially surprising is the fact that so many teams couldn't name 1 prophet and only slightly more than half of the teens can identify the members of the Trinity.

What did Jesus Say?
(asked to fill in BLANKS of a quote)
25% From that time on Jesus began to preach, "Repent, for the KINGDOM of heaven is near.”
24% You are the SALT of the earth...You are the LIGHT of the world
53% “But I tell you: Love your ENEMIES and pray for those who persecute you”
09% “Not everyone who says to me, ’LORD, LORD,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father”
78% "For God so LOVED the world that he gave his one and only SON, that whoever BELIEVES in him shall not perish but have ETERNAL life.”
Analysis: This is the portion of the quiz I am most interested in addressing. The majority of teens, outside of John 3:16, were quite unfamiliar with some of the most famous words of Jesus.

4 comments:

Dena said...

Pretty interesting, and pretty sad. Were most of these teens core youth members, come occasionally, or something else? For comparison sake I gave Elliott the quiz to see how a BBC grad relates. Luckily he passed with flying colors. Wew, I guess that degree was worth something after all.

matthew said...

Haha, I'm glad Elliott passed the test!

It's really hard to tell how many of the 114 teens were 'core' youth group members. There were teens from almost 10 different churches not to mention quite a lot of unchurched kids that simply came to the famine with their 'churched' friends.

Add to that the fact that when they took the test, they hadn't eaten in about 25 hours and the results are not very disappointing :)

Bryan said...

I think that it is very impressive that they answered that well considering that when i was in school the word creationism was not spoken by any science teacher that i had.

matthew said...

yeah, i think especially on the first half of the multiple choice they did a good job