Thursday, November 8, 2007

Church attendance

Christianity Today posts about a study reporting that regular church attendance is at about 25% and hasn't dropped much in recent years.
Presser and Chaves take a different route to tracking religious attendance in their study. They think that when asked directly about attending church, people tend to overreport their presence in the pews. In this study, the two sociologists pay more attention to time-use studies in which individuals say what they did on days of the week to avoid asking participants directly about church attendance.

According to the time-use studies, Presser and Chaves conclude that religious attendance did decline slightly in the period between 1950 and 1990. Mainline Protestant and Catholic service attendance also declined over that period. According to the authors, there is currently no theory of religious change that accounts for periods of stability alternating with periods of decline.

However, Presser and Chaves determine that attendance has been stable (at about 25%) since the 1990s. ....
"Not declining" is welcome news, growing attendance would be better.

Is Church Attendance Declining? | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous6:37 PM

    Interesting methodology of time use. People believe that they are in church more then they actually are not so amazing from a preachers point of view. ElmerTowns used to say that even your most comitted Sunday teacher would miss 1/4 of the time.

    ReplyDelete

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