American Church in Crisis: Church Attendance

I have started reading The American Church in Crisis by David T. Olson. It is a new book that was recommended to me by a Fuller professor friend and is based upon research done on over 200,000 churches.

I thought I would blog a bit as I go chapter by chapter since there is probably too much to reflect upon as a whole.

Chapter 1 deals with church attendance. Olson acknowledges what most pastors have been suspicious of - namely that many polls regarding church attendance greatly over estimate the reality of American church attendance. Olson blames the high number of people that say "yes" to church attendance on what is called the "halo effect." According to the halo effect people generally over estimate in poll questions the number of "good" things they do and under estimate the number of "bad" or unhealthy things they do. Thus, most polls results greatly over-estimate church attendance.

Studying actual church attendance numbers rather than poll results, Olson estimates that any given weekend in America 9.1% attend an evangelical church, 3% attend a mainline church, and 5.3% attend a Catholic church (an additional 2% attend what he calls "non-orthodox" churches). That is a total regular Christian church attendance of 17.5%.

He estimates that another 5.5% of the population attends church semi-regularly (3 out of 8 weeks) and gives money on occasion. An additional 14% have some connection to a church and another 15% claim church membership but rarely if ever attend. (Around the church we would tend to call this last 29% C and E's - people who say they have a church but attend only on Christmas and/or Easter).

So the main result is that although about 50% of the American population would claim some affiliation with a church - 77% of the population is just simply not there on any given week.

For those of us on either coast the numbers are usually two-thirds to half of what they are in the midwest, so it's probably not inaccurate to estimate that 88 to 84% of the population is not worshiping anywhere on any given Sunday (weekend). What an overwhelming challenge - but what a mission field!

Comments

[Laura]

A quote I ran across when travelling in San Francisco on a recent weekend--I confess I haven't read this book: "You cannot deal with a perfect, all-loving, all-forgiving, all-understanding God in heaven, if you cannot deal with a less-than-perfect, less-than-forgiving, and less-than-understanding community here on earth. You cannot pretend to be dealing with an invisible God if you refuse to deal with a visible family…. Concrete community is a nonnegotiable element within the spiritual quest because, precisely, we are Christians not simply theists. God is not just in heaven, God is also on earth…. Part of the very essence of Christianity is to be together in a concrete community, with all the real human faults that are there and the tensions that this will bring."— Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing.

Blessings!