How Churchlist records a church contribution

The rules for putting a figure on the ledger: one claim, one unit, a date, a place, and a document a reader can open.

Nigerian churches run schools, clinics, feeding programmes, and relief work that the country actually uses. That is a plain observation. It is not yet a statistic. A statistic is a number attached to a method. Churchlist exists to hold those numbers in public, one at a time, with the document they came from.

This page is the method. It does not contain a national total. The sample rows elsewhere on the site are labelled placeholder and are blank on purpose. If you came here to quote “how much the church contributes,” you are early. Quote a sourced entry, or wait until one exists.

One claim per entry

An entry answers one question. “How many primary schools did this denomination list in this year?” is one question. “How much does the church do for Nigeria?” is not. The second question invites a speech. The first invites a table.

The fields on every stat page are there to keep the claim small enough to check:

Title and summary. What is being claimed, in ordinary language, without a number smuggled into the headline unless the source uses that number.
Category. Education, healthcare, welfare, employment, economy, disaster relief, or community development. The field guide says what belongs in each, and what must not be added across them.
Figure and unit. The value, and what it counts. Schools are not pupils. Beds are not visits. Jobs are not Sunday attendance.
Geography and period. Nigeria, a state, a city, or a named institution, and the time the figure covers.
As-of date. The day the figure was true according to the source, written as a calendar date.
Source name, URL, and citation. Who published it, where to open it, and a line a librarian could follow.

If any of those is missing, the row can still sit in the editor as a draft or a placeholder. It cannot be published as a fact. The form refuses that combination.

What counts as a source

A usable source is a document someone else can open. A denominational yearbook, an education-ministry list, a hospital annual report, a NEMA bulletin, a peer-reviewed paper, or a statistical table with a title page all qualify. A sermon, a conference slogan, a WhatsApp broadcast, and an unsourced graphic do not. They can be a reason to go looking. They are not the citation.

Secondary reporting is allowed when it names the underlying document and links it. “A newspaper said a bishop said 10,000” is a lead. The entry should prefer the bishop’s report, and if that report cannot be found the number stays off the public ledger.

The source URL has to be a real public address. A citation with no link can support a draft. Publishing a non-placeholder row requires the link, because a reader who cannot get to the document cannot check us.

What we will not do with the numbers

We will not add a school count to a hospital count and call the sum “projects.” We will not turn a state figure into a national figure by multiplying. We will not treat the absence of an entry as evidence that the work does not happen. The ledger is a list of what has been documented here, not a census of the church.

We will not publish a single naira total for “the church’s contribution to GDP” unless a named study shows its method: what was included, what was left out, which year, and who calculated it. That bar is deliberate. Round trillions are easy to applaud and impossible to audit.

Placeholders

The site ships with a few rows marked placeholder. They show editors and readers the shape of a page: the figure line, the source box, the category. The value is an em dash. The source line says it is not a publication. Those pages are kept out of the sitemap and marked so search engines should not index them. They are not a quiet way of asserting a number.

When a real source replaces a placeholder, the editor unchecks the placeholder box, fills the value, the date, the URL, and the citation, and publishes. Re-importing the same slug updates the row instead of creating a twin. The contact form is there for anyone who has the document and wants it entered.

The directory is a different kind of record

Bible sellers are not a contribution statistic. A shop is a place. Its page records a name, a state, a city, an address, a phone, a website, what it sells, whether it delivers, and the date someone last checked. That is a directory entry, described in Finding a Bible to buy in Nigeria. It is not added to the ledger and it is not evidence of the size of the church.