MERIDIAN, MS — A deacon at Cornerstone Baptist Church has been quietly maintaining a personal attendance spreadsheet since 2009, and the document now contains more accurate congregational data than any official church record in existence, sources confirmed this week.

Harold Finch, 71, began the project during what he describes as “a slow stretch in the announcements” and has since logged 884 consecutive Sundays of attendance figures, cross-referenced by weather conditions, sermon series, potluck scheduling, and proximity to major sporting events. The spreadsheet, currently 4,200 rows across seventeen tabs, includes a color-coded absentee flag system Finch developed himself and has never shown to anyone.

“I’m not trying to overstep,” said Finch, who has never been on the membership committee, the counting team, or any committee with the word ‘records’ in the name. “I just like to know where we are.”

“He told me attendance was down 11 percent in February. I told him we don’t track that. He said, ‘I know.’”

Pastor Glenn Okafor, 48, became aware of the spreadsheet last month when Finch quietly corrected the church’s annual report during a business meeting using figures from his phone. A subsequent review found that the church’s official attendance records had not been updated since 2017 and consisted of a single spiral notebook with water damage.

“He offered to share it,” Okafor said. “I said yes. He said he’d need to prepare a summary version first. That was three weeks ago.”

At press time, Finch had begun a companion document tracking how long it takes the church to respond to his summary document, currently at twenty-two days and rising.