Teen Mania prepare an annual report to give to donors and potential donors in order to persuade them to open their wallets to Teen Mania Ministries. This annual report provides some interesting information, some sketchy information and some outright lies.
For the latter, I’d like to direct your attention to the graphic comparing Honor Academy alumni to adults in America. (What kinds of adults? All adults, all Christians, all protestant Christians? It doesn’t matter because the “statistics” look made up anyway!)
It’s hard to see so I’ll break it down for you.
Percentage of Honor Academy Alumni vs. American Adults: (Note their is no source cited for these stats)
Actively Involved in Ministry:
HA Alumni: 77%
Avg. Adults: 32%
Spending Time with God More than Once a Week:
HA Alumni: 70%
Avg. Adults: 42%
Attending or Graduating College:
HA Alumni: 88%
Avg. Adults: 37%
Preparing or Serving on Missions Field:
HA Alumni: 47%
Avg. Adults: .1%
Wow! Look how awesome Honor Academy alumni are compared to the average American adult! Nearly half of them are heading towards the mission field! If you are an alumnus, half of your friends are overseas, right…? Right?
Hardly.
When has Teen Mania EVER conducted a comprehensive study on the true state of their alumni? NEVER!*
Again I say, NEVER!
Teen Mania is severely out of touch with the state of many/most(?) of their program graduates.
So how could they possibly know how many alumni have graduated from college? Much less how many are “spending time with God” or “actively involved in ministry.”
Where is the graphic for how many alumni have left their faith or had suicidal thoughts because of the Honor Academy?
Oh yeah, that one doesn’t raise money.
* I’m told that an email survey of alumni was conducted in 2007 but the sample size must have been extremely narrow if nearly 50% of them are in missions work.
29 COMMENTS
Eric | June 21, 2011 at 10:24 pm | ReplyAccording to research by the Pew Forum, 78% of all Evangelical Protestants say they pray at least once a day. So if only 70% of HA alumni spend time with God* weekly…. who’s below average?Also, if you think about it the other way round– coming out of a program where they are required to “spend time with God” every single day, now 30% of HA alumni don’t even do it once a week, according to HA’s own figures. That’s a pretty substantial failure rate. According to the best they could fabricate (with no sources), 3 in 10 TM interns will abandon Christian spiritual practices!Is that where you want to be giving your money, donors?(As for my alma mater, 100% of current Moody Bible Institute students are taking college-level courses. Fact.)* What is that supposed to mean, anyway? God’s omnipresent.
shyvioletgirl | June 21, 2011 at 11:03 pm | ReplyI would be totally willing to participate in an alumni survey from Teen Mania. I think that’s a great idea.- Maurice Moss | June 21, 2011 at 11:43 pm | ReplyI saw you tweeted a link to this annual report. The page you’re talking about here is where I stopped, mouth gaping, disgusted. It is so unbelievably proud, legalistic, arrogant, and Pharisaical that it made me sick.However, I have to correct you on one thing: the Honor Academy HAS done a survey of its alumni before. In 2007, an email was sent out to a large number of alumni with a link to a SurveyMonkey survey that was used to collect data about alumni. I’m not sure if the results were ever published, but I know the results were compiled into a report for Dave.Obviously, the email list was not comprehensive, and it would have been a lot more likely that recent graduates and those favorable to the ministry would have responded rather than older, more disillusioned alumni, so there’s some obvious bias in the results. Furthermore, I have absolutely no knowledge of any other survey that has been conducted since. I’m pretty sure I would have received an email about it if one had, though.I still have the email that was sent out to alumni about the survey…it’s not very exciting, but it proves that it happened.
- Shannon Kish | June 22, 2011 at 12:00 am | ReplyUm wow. When your sample sizes have such a huge gap, yes, the HA looks awesome. The Happy has a couple thousand alumni, so even if only 30% were surveyed that is small compared to the 30% of Americans that would be surveyed.They really need someone qualified to conduct research to do their research.Speaking of which, we could conduct a surveymonkey survey of all alumni as well….. hint hint
- Recovering Alumni | June 22, 2011 at 12:39 am | ReplyMaurice – thank you for that info! I was not aware of that survey – I wonder how large it was and if it included alumni from across all years? To get a near 50% of alumni that are on the mission field or preparing for it, they must have weighted the correspondents in their favor since we all know the real number is nowhere near that.It would not be hard for TM to send out a survey to ALL of the alumni whose contact info they have (Ron sent out an email to them last year so we know it can be done!). I know it won’t happen though. Shannon is right, it would need a qualified 3rd party to conduct any such research.Maurice – I will update the post accordingly.
- Anonymous | June 22, 2011 at 3:16 am | ReplyWas that the same survey that asked if you were gay?? I remember being so put off by their highly personal questions, sent through such an informal, cold medium that I just wanted to disassociate myself with them forever.
Honestly, I think at least 20% of the individuals I know from TMM are homosexual. Much higher than any “most adults” sample groups they could get anywhere. )Except maybe San Francisco. - C.R. | June 22, 2011 at 4:21 am | ReplyThe college thing is bull. All of the HAO interns that finished the program seem to be wandering around aimlessly looking for something to do with themselves because the real world turned out to be too much for them to handle. Those of us who left are in college, and doing well. Hmmmmmm…
Nunquam Honorablus | June 22, 2011 at 6:32 am | ReplyYeah, how do you even poll something like that accurately? Especially with the pressure to please/not be confronted by leadership with your feedback.Yeah man sticky stuff- Jan2001 | June 22, 2011 at 12:07 pm | ReplyThe group of people they surveyed must be only alumni who keep in touch (or are still there), aka the lifers. Other than emails/mail asking for money, I’ve heard nothing from TM in ten years.
- Moriah | June 22, 2011 at 1:31 pm | Replyyeah, as soon as I saw these “stats”, I knew they were bullshit. TM registers low on intellectual ability, even though the way they manipulate and use people is intelligent in a twisted way. These statistics are ridiculously silly and I also fault anyone who actually takes them seriously.
- heartsfire | June 22, 2011 at 2:13 pm | ReplyGiven the recent statement by Heath that they make anyone there longer than two years go to college while still there I have no doubt in my mind those who would respond to a non-scientific Survey monkey survey would be in college or college graduates. IF they use the stats from this survey sending it to a sample that may or may not be representative of the whole. I suspect in this case they are not only not representative but set so that the people that they could still reliably track down (AKA Old timers that are Youth Pastors/annual Leadership for TM events/ Missionaries asking leadership for support and the newer interns that haven’t gotten a chance to really have life outside the BUBBLES). In setting a specialized group they woudl get percentages that they could brag about. Since most of those of us that are not fans of TM wouldn’t even want to deal with an email from them dissent is not likely to be noticed.
- Krista | June 23, 2011 at 3:47 am | ReplyIn the words of Mark Twain, “There are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics.” 🙂
- jenn | June 23, 2011 at 4:49 am | ReplyI graduated TM before 07 (try 10yrs before) and I was NOT part of a survey…
Actually i know numerous people in my class who have not been surveyed! Interesting- wonder who they chose (ironically I am a Youth Pastor) so I could have *boosted* their numbers… But I was not a superstar intern so i imagine I wasn’t worth much of a vote… - Shiloh | June 23, 2011 at 2:40 pm | ReplyWow. Even if they serveyed every single alumni and that was the true results… even IF… This is a total ‘us vs. them’ mentality. LOOK AT OUR WORKS! Very very very stupid. I feel very foolish for ever believing the lies. I want to say a personal thank you to everyone who has stuck around the blog to help me recover from all the B.S. I learned at T.M.
This has helped me so much.
Thanks guys. - Curious George | June 24, 2011 at 7:24 pm | Reply77% of Alumni are actively involved in ministry yet only 70% spend time with God more than once a week. Interesting…
- 1st Time Mommy | June 25, 2011 at 7:23 pm | ReplyI wasn’t surveyed…..this is the type of stuff I would have read in the past and been so excited about and totally believed. How embarassing…..
- Anonymous | June 26, 2011 at 3:35 am | ReplyDoes God include “Ron Luce”?
- Anonymous | June 27, 2011 at 7:09 pm | ReplyI remember the survey in 2007…and I remember being asked if you had sex before marriage, etc.
- Esther | July 5, 2011 at 9:22 am | Reply“The college thing is bull. All of the HAO interns that finished the program seem to be wandering around aimlessly looking for something to do with themselves because the real world turned out to be too much for them to handle. Those of us who left are in college, and doing well. Hmmmmmm…”I would disagree with this. Not all interns who finished are wandering around aimlessly. I’m certainly not.
- Anonymous | July 8, 2011 at 4:04 am | ReplyWe can debate on how effect survey are, however, not every survey is a 100% accurate. There are many survey’s that happen everyday all over the country and most of us probably haven’t been asked to participate in 1% of them. The report that you are looking at is an old one. If I am not mistaken there is one that comes out every year. Hence the name, Annual Report. I look forward to seeing this years.
- Recovering Alumni | July 8, 2011 at 4:05 am | ReplyAnonymous – You totally missed the point…..BTW, this report IS for the current year.
- Shannon Kish | July 8, 2011 at 4:33 am | ReplyAnon, You are correct. Surveys and research are designed to predict outcomes based on a small sample size and therefore generalize it to a larger population. So, no, you don’t need 100% participation to get an accurate prediction/analysis.The problem is that this report doesn’t cite sources or provide any details on the study. Why is this a problem? Well, for all we know they surveyed 10 people and generalized it to the entire alumni body. A sample of 10 is not large enough to have a representative sample that will provide statistically accurate information.TM gave us no information to allow us to verify their study. I can make up stats all day long and not provide you with any research to back it up. Without the research findings to back it up, my stats are worthless.For me to take TM’s Annual Report seriously and to believe what they are claiming, I need to know how the research was conducted, who was the population, how was the sample chosen, what confidence interval did they use, how many were in the sample, what is the socio-economic breakdown of the sample, who conducted the research… etc. All of that information is lacking and therefore makes their stats worthless drivel until they can back it up with the research findings.Look beyond the stats of any research to the heart of how, why, and what the research was designed to measure and you will find that the stats reported on the news, etc. only tells a PART of the story.And that was this week’s lesson in, “I am surprised I remembered any of that information from this week’s Applied Research class because I was half-asleep.”
- Shannon Kish | July 8, 2011 at 4:34 am | Replyoh, BTW, the report has been taken down from that website, oddly enough. I guess TM didn’t like us snooping around their annual reports for false information. LMAO!
- Anonymous | July 16, 2011 at 3:22 am | ReplyAccording to an unbiased, well researched source Teen Mania “Ministries” is in the third quartile among it’s peers for financial performance.http://www.openendowment.org/organization/category?n=X21If you look under other categories you see some truly bad organizations that are treating their finances better than the TMM “leaders”
- Anonymous | July 31, 2011 at 5:00 pm | ReplyMaybe teen mania should pole people like me who left the HA early because it was pure junk. I was raised active in church for 18 years and then took the next step…the “honor” academy. What a waste. Pay to be a slave is what it is. My wife and I currently sponsor orphans and are active annually in missions….without the Honor Academy and without a Honor ring.Interns provide so much free labor and pay so much to be there..all while making money for the company…why do they need donors anyway?? I think I know 😉
- Anonymous | August 15, 2011 at 11:17 pm | ReplyTM doesnt make the figures up. I actually asked about that once, and they get alot of the “adults in America” figures from the Gideons, and other religious organizations. But yeah the TM figures they get from alumni that they survey. Its the same as ANY survey in America, its not always accurate, but its the closest you can get to accuracy. AND Eric, I dont know many youth age Christians that pray at least once a day. Sad but true. I dont know what universe you live in, but I went to public highschool and know lots of Christians their and they never prayed. But yeah, I know a few people they surveyed 2 years ago for TM, and these results look pretty accurate.
- Nunquam Honorablus | August 15, 2011 at 11:57 pm | ReplyI just want to know how not praying everyday is a sad thing. I’d think it’s more fortunate that teens aren’t trapped in a theology where interaction with God is a daily ritual to be checked off of a to-do list.If you’re monitoring how often people talk to God, you’re missing the point.
- Shannon Kish | August 16, 2011 at 6:02 am | ReplyAnon, I would love to actually see the RAW numbers… we are not suggesting that TM doesn’t have the RAW numbers, but that they fail to provide them, or even hint at where they came from.And just because you know 1 person that fits the stats that TM listed, does NOT make the stats accurate. Perhaps a basic stats class would be helpful to both you and TM.
- layne | August 16, 2011 at 2:12 pm | ReplyI think we’ve had a major influx of trolls here lately. Don’t feed em!
