The Church Times reported last week that church attendance in the US today is more of a mixed picture than it used to be, with churchgoers mixing online and in-person worship, while at the same time increasingly attending a portfolio of different churches, rather than sticking with just the one church.
The study, ‘Exploring Pandemic Impact on Congregations’, which was published by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and based on a survey of 24,000 churchgoers in the US, was carried out last autumn. It found that a quarter of respondents now regularly participated in both virtual services and in person, and these were typically younger people with families, many of whom had increased their church attendance in the last 5 years.
Separately 46% of respondents said they regularly attended or viewed services in different churches, with younger churchgoers and black Americans the more likely to do so.
Interestingly enough, a quarter of respondents said that they had increased the amount of time they spent volunteering in church, and many new churchgoers said that they too had started to volunteer. 37% said that they had increased their financial contributions to their church during the last five years.
At the same time, many regular churchgoers said that they missed their old patterns of worship and were finding change difficult. As a result, one of the researchers, Scott Thumma, reminded us of the tight rope that ministry often requires of our clergy: “The challenge for clergy is how to deliver the stability of formerly established patterns for the two-thirds of long-term attenders while also maintaining the flexibility and openness to change for the remaining third of participants who joined during the pandemic.”
Will the pattern we see now in the US be replicated here in Europe?
Read the full article in the Church Times here.