OUTLOOK ISSN 0969-1049 INCORPORATING THE SWEDENBORG MOVEMENT NEWSLETTER	No. 28 1998
	Keeping the score
Levitas WB Yeats and Swedenborg Books that might have been A town built on a hill Keeping the score The Big Bang Jesus, man or God ? the Easter Question Promise of Spring Science and truth The Millennium WebMaster Other Contacts Forthcoming Other Links	There are few pleasures to compare with putting other people 'in their place'. True gamesmanship requires that everything and everyone may be neatly graded and safely slotted into their own niche. A proper sporting attitude to life demands that we all aspire to be in the 'top ten': anything else is simple not playing fair. I am not just thinking of popularity polls, or interest rates, or income brackets. It's far more serious. What about 'Classic Countdown' and 'University Challenge' and 'Mastermind'? To keep a grip on our changing fortunes we need to know who's in the charts and who isn't, just as we need to know our blood group and our size in collars. My local grammar school is wallowing in the glory of having been deemed eighth in the national league table. It is apparently one of the most cost-effective educational establishments in the country, thanks, no doubt, to the diligence and ambition of its pupils and their parents, not to mention the fervour of its teaching staff. The table tells the tax-payer, of course, whether he is getting his money's worth. I wonder how long it will be before this admirable scheme finds its way into the churches. I suppose it may be a little difficult to assess precisely what percentage of a given congregation were actually admitted to the celestial heavens in any one year. Religious experience may be hard to quantify except perhaps in terms of client-satisfaction; God-satisfaction being some-what beyond our present scope. Even so, the volume of hymn-singing could easily be measured, examinations in sermon content could, I'm sure, be devised, and the results graded A-B-C. With computerised testing, clerical personality traits could be classified in some way. Thus we should know which churches were the best buy, with the best spiritual prospects on offer. On the other hand, there are still some decadent folk who insist that you cannot fool the eternal book-keeper, and that God is the only one who really knows the score. Skriber

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