October 26th, 2010 at 12:00AM

The American Church in Crisis (part 1 of 2)

How many Americans actively participate with a church community on a regular basis?

At a recent class on church planting I had the opportunity to talk with David Olson, author of The American Church in Crisis.  He explained that nationwide surveys regarding church participation are wildly exaggerated due to the “halo effect” (the gap between how we project ourselves in a survey and the way we actually are).

George Barna reported in 2005 that 47% of American adults attend a church on a regular basis (see “Church Attendance,” barna.org).  This would mean 140 Million people!  However, the actual numbers paint a much different picture.

For years, David Olson has been gathering statistical headcounts of weekly attendance in Catholic, Evangelical, and Mainline Churches (which itself may be exaggerated according to some).  For the first time he shared his updated statistics through 2009 (the statistics from his book are from 2005).

While Olson explored the reasons behind the statistics and how the church can respond to this crisis, I want you to see the following three graphs which to me are the most shocking:


#culture#research and statistics
October 26th, 2010 at 12:00AM

The American Church in Crisis (part 2 of 2)

In my first post on The American Church in Crisis I mentioned the basis of David Olson’s
research and showed the updated statistics of church participation in America.  This post describes the two dominant statistical traits of growing churches.

The first dominant statistic for growing churches is that they are young.  In biology, the fastest human growth is at the beginning of the life cycle (newborn – toddler – early elementary years).  Then we slow down, eventually hit mid-life, and…well you know the rest.  While churches struggling with a mid-life crisis or old age can and do experience transformation, the growth of new churches in America’s recent history is much greater.  Checkout the graph:

The second dominant statistic of growing churches is that they either small or large. Olson describes a small church as having 49 or less and large church as having 2,000 and above (both of which had the same growth rate).  The lack of growth in between (particularly with churches between 100-500 members) is what Olson describes as the “mid-sized challenge” because these congregations are both too large for the intimacy of a small church and too small for the excellence of a larger multi-resource church.  While I’m not sure the paradigm of “excellence” in a larger church is contributing to the deep discipleship our consumer culture needs, the research does speak to the human need to be in close community with a few others as well as part of something much bigger. Checkout this second graph:

How might these two traits of growing churches impact both new church development and redevelopment of older congregations?

#culture#research and statistics