7 Startling Facts: An Up Close Look at Church Attendance in America

1. Less than 20 percent of Americans regularly attend church—half of what the pollsters report.

While Gallup polls and other statisticians have turned in the same percentage—about 40 percent of the population—of average weekend church attendees for the past 70 years, a different sort of research paints quite a disparate picture of how many Americans attend a local church on any given Sunday.

Initially prompted to discover how church plants in America were really doing, Olson, director of church planting for the Evangelical Covenant Church (covchurch.org), began collecting data in the late ’80s, gradually expanding his research to encompass overall attendance trends in the church. In his study, he tracked the annual attendance of more than 200,000 individual Orthodox Christian churches (the accepted U.S. church universe is 330,000). To determine attendance at the remaining 100,000-plus Orthodox Christian churches, he used statistical models, which included multiplying a church’s membership number by the denomination’s membership-to-attendance ratio. Read More

A fascinating article on church attendance in the United States but the use of the term "Orthodox Christian churches" to describe Catholic, mainline, and evangelical churches is misleading, as one of the posts in the comment thread points out. The articles does not provide a criteria for why these categories of churches should be considered "orthodox." Presumably the term "orthodox" is being used to distinguish them from sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons.