Most churches have noticed a significant drop in their worship attendance over the past decade or more. In recent months some of this has been due to the Covid pandemic, but this decrease began well before anyone ever heard of Covid. Some point to the rising number of "Nones," those individuals who report None on survey questions about their religious or church preference. Others claim that it is due to a growing distrust of churches. While each of these do have an impact on worship attendance, much of the decline is internal. Christians do not attend church as often as they used to.
This is known as decreasing attendance frequency and has been called the number one reason for the decline we see in worship attendance. Will Mancini points out how much of an impact this has on a church in his book Future Church: Seven Laws of Real Church Growth. He writes, "Let's say your committed attenders used to come to worship 3.2 times per month on average, but now they come 1.7 times per month (both reasonable estimates, though figures vary from church to church)." Using a chart he demonstrates how this impacts the average worship service attendance in different size churches.
In a church with 100 regular worship attenders, when their average attendance was 3.1 times per month, a church would have an attendance of 74 people, not counting guests. However, when the average attendance drops to 1.7 times per month, there are only 39 people in attendance, not counting guests. Moving to a church with 250 regular worshipers, when people attended an average of 3.1 times per month the church attendance would be 185 people, not counting guests. When that figure dropped to people attending worship services 1.7 times per month the attendance is now 98 people, not counting guests. His chart goes on to compare even larger churches, but this is enough to demonstrate the impact that decreasing attendance frequency has on the numbers of people who attend worship services. Before we complain about the empty seats in our sanctuaries we need to look at ourselves and ask how much of that is due to our own attendance habits.
This may be a new normal that church leaders will have to accept and find ways to continue to do ministry. Pastors will now be called to serve three congregations. One congregation will be those physically present in our services. A second congregation will be those who will be content to be part of our social media congregation, and a third group will occasionally be physically present in our services and continue to watch the services on social media the remainder of the time. This is going to be a great challenge to pastors and church leaders.
How will each congregation be discipled? Who will be responsible for pastoral or congregational care? How do we make the social media congregation feel they are part of the church, and how do we connect those who are physically present with those who participate through social media? How will this impact the financial support of the church? How does this new normal impact the number of volunteers a church needs, and where will those volunteers be found? What is the best way to involve each of these congregations in small groups or Sunday school classes? Do any of these congregations get preference over the others? What's the best way to include each of these congregations in our religious sacraments such as Communion and baptism? I'm sure you can think of many other challenges this new normal will bring to the church.
About now, you're probably hoping I'll give you some answers. I can't because I don't know the answer to each of these questions, at least not for your church. I haven't read any further in Mancini's book to know if he has any answers either. Perhaps the best thing your pastors and the leaders of the church can do is to wrestle with these questions and find the best answer for your church. What is important for you to know is that, barring some national emergency that drives people back into the church, we are unlikely to see the kinds of numbers of people attending worship services that we saw in the 50s and 60s. We simply must find new and better ways of doing ministry going forward.
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