Where does this quotation come from?

We were in a seminar today about God's work in mission and this quotation was thrown into the discussion. It doesn't feature (yet) on Google, so I am putting it here for Google to find!

"If the impossible is not part of our plans, then God is not one of our partners".

What does that have to do with O.R.? Not much, but it is a reminder that O.R. cannot be applied to Christian work because of God's role in it!

The Harvest Thanksgiving Supply Chain

In an earlier blog I mentioned links between O.R. and Christianity. September and October are the months when (in the Northern Hemisphere's temperate regions) churches celebrate harvest thanksgiving. (Cue for the traditional harvest hymn: "We plough the fields and scatter, The good seed on the land, But it is fed and watered, By God's Almighty hand." You can tell that I am a Brit, because I spell plough without a "w".) Increasingly church services also give thanks for the makers and producers of food -- and at our service yesterday the preacher thanked God for the drivers of delivery trucks -- she almost used the words "supply chain", but the congregation would not have been familiar with that technical term.

Operational Research and Christianity

I recently read that the educational background of the Bishop Sarah Frances Davis in the African Methodist Episcopal church has a degree in Management Science. Can O.R./M.S. help in such a role? In IAOR, there are several papers recorded which refer to applications of O.R. in the life of the church. In the 1970's and 80's, Malcolm King, Alan Mercer and I published some papers about the place of modelling in the deployment of clergy in the U.K.

[Malcolm King, David K. Smith and Alan Mercer "Towards Diocesan Planning" Journal of the Operational Research Society 29 p856-866 (1978); Malcolm King and David K. Smith "Are the Clergy Being Deployed Fairly?" The Churchman 5 p54-60 (1980); Malcolm King and David K. Smith "Planning the Deployment of Clergy" Long Range Planning 5 p104-111 (1982)]

Earlier, Alan had published "The Churching of Urban England" in the proceedings of the 1969 IFORS conference, which looked at the location of places of worship.

So there are two possible areas for fruitful O.R.; manpower planning, and location models.

I wonder if Bishop Davis knows about this work.