The Ecclesial Quotient (EcQ)

Because I’m twisted, I had this thought. How could you calculate someone’s contribution to the Kingdom of God?

I began mulling this over and started doodling terms for what I’ll call the Ecclesial Quotient (EcQ). (You must realize this is all a bit of a joke. But I like little exercises like this because they tend to pose or expose, quite unexpectedly, theological issues.)

If you would like to participate in building the EcQ you can start by thinking of EcQ terms, building this index piece by piece.

For the first term of the EcQ, I’ll propose the Moral Exemplar Term (MET).

The MET is the degree to which you are considered to be a moral exemplar to your ecclesial community. For a theological foundation I based the MET on the Fruits of the Spirit: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Here’s how the MET would work. You would get a communal rating (details unspecified) from 1-10 on how much a targeted person displays each of the nine fruits. A marking of 1 denotes you as a moral idiot as in its original meaning: One lacking in a skill or knowledge. A rating of 10 marks you as a moral paragon of said fruit.

If you summed the nine ratings and divided by 90 you would get a score ranging from 0.0 to 1.0 giving you your MET score.

The trouble with this procedure—and this is where theology comes in—is this: Should the fruits be weighted equally? If not, then each fruit score would need to be weighted before averaging. If such a weighting were done, how should the weights be assigned? For example, does love get weighted more than self-control?

So, building the EcQ we have one term in our equation: MET.

Any feedback on the MET or would you like to propose the next term?

FYI, this is the kind of stuff I think about during church services. Clearly, something is wrong with me…

Enjoy your weekend!