Church attendance on the decline

Christian Century, Sept 11, 1996

Church attendance across denominational lines has suffered a five-year decline and has sunk to its lowest level in two decades, according to research by the Barna Research Group of Glendale, California. "From the early '80s to the early '90s, there has been a definite change," said Bruce Hose, who was director of Sunday school programs for the 1-million-member Alabama Baptist Convention from 1985 to 1995. "Not only has attendance gone down but it is a graying culture, a graying congregation."

Hose said the Assemblies of God, the Southern Baptist Convention and some other denominations have continued to make membership gains, but much of the growth has taken place in newly emerging megachurches. In telephone surveys of 1,004 U.S. adults 18 and over, Barna Research Group said 37 percent of Americans now report going to church on a given Sunday. Attendance peaked in 1991 at 49 percent and dropped to 47 percent in 1992, 45 percent in 1993 and 42 percent in 1994 and 1995, according to the Barna poll numbers. "Increasingly, we are seeing Christian churches lose entire segments of the population: men, singles, empty nesters ... and people who were raised in mainline Protestant churches," wrote pollster George Barna.

"If his poll data is right, it's even worse than what we think we have found," said Samford University researcher Penny Long Marler, who has taken part in studies showing that actual church attendance is only about half of that indicated by telephone polls. "It may be where we're heading."

Many churches have been lulled into a false sense of security for years by Gallup poll figures that appeared to show church attendance remaining constant, Hose pointed out. Gallup polls have remained steady for three decades in reporting that about 43 percent of people say in telephone surveys that they attended church the previous week, Marler said. But with the increasing population, a steady 43 percent church attendance should have resulted in a massive influx of people for the nation's churches. "That's clearly not been the case," Marler said. "Clearly something has been fishy about the polling."

Mainline Protestant churches have lost millions of members over the past three decades, and growth at evangelical Protestant churches has not been nearly large enough to offset those losses, Marler said. Many baby boomers who returned to church while rearing their children have stopped attending since their children have grown up and left home, noted Barna Research Group spokesman Dave Kinnaman. "That's certainly a factor," he said.

According to Kinnaman, the peak in church attendance in 1991 probably had much to do with the Persian Gulf war, the breakdown of the Soviet Union and economic recession. "Those types of issues formed a climate conducive to church attendance," he said. Also influencing increased church attendance was the Willow Creek Community Church model, a trend in "seeker-sensitive" church services based on the corporate-style approach of that suburban Chicago congregation. That model may have lost some of its novelty appeal, Kinnaman ventured.

But Marler, whose studies have pointed out the difference in actual behavior and what people tell pollsters, warned that such fluctuations in polling numbers can be a consequence of sampling error. She said it's very clear, however, that America's church attendance habit has faded. "All denominations, including conservative Protestants, have grown slower. There has been a very large decline in institutional religion."

Marler has teamed with other researchers to study the nation's 78 million "marginal" Protestants who claim a traditional religious identity but are not active in churches. "There are really very few people who do not identify with anything," she said. "They're still saying `I'm a Baptist'--but they don't belong to a local church and they don't go."

Young people are confused about morals and not familiar with religious tradition, and the global youth culture has become pluralistic and relativistic, Marler said. "I don't think anybody's doing much to help them sort it out. It's not just a phase they're going through. There's less of a reason to say they'll come back when they never went in the first place. The reserves of religious tradition are dwindling."

The U.S. may be following many other secular nations in becoming a society without rigorous systems of religious education in which churches, temples and mosques serve as moral training grounds. "It's a valuable tool for moral and ethical training," Marler said. Warning that a relativistic youth culture, without a core ethical tradition, could make for a troublesome society, she added: "I'm not sure what kind of person it would form. We've never tried it."