Church Attendance Is Dying. Here’s What’s Next.

Church attendance is dying. Big time.

It’s not just reflected in the size of the decline, it’s reflected in the quality and nuances of those numbers.

At least two massive, seismic shifts are at work in our culture causing this. First, we’re moving from Christendom into a post-Christian, post-modern era literally in our lifetime.

Second, we’re in the midst of the biggest technological shift in human history. The digital disruption happening all around us. The digital disruption isn’t just coming. It’s here. And it’s changing attendance patterns at your church whether you recognize it or not....

We could add a third reason: We western Christians have been anemic in our mission over the last number of decades. But that’s kind of one of the main points I make again and again on this blog. So we’ve covered that before and will cover it again.

Regardless, people who used to attend regularly aren’t. Whole groups of people are gone.

So what does this mean for today and for the future church? Read More

In some parts of the Bible Belt in the United States the decline in church attendance may not be immediately discernible. On Sundays I drive past several churches whose parking lots are filled with cars. I also drive past a number of churches whose parking lots are empty. If I mistakenly believed as many folks do in my part of the Bible Belt that the region has a lot of churchgoers because it has a lot of churches, I might erroneously conclude that if I had driven past these churches at a different hour, I might have seen cars in their parking lots. Windshield surveys of church parking lots, however, are not a reliable method of measuring church attendance. It gives you only a very rough idea of attendance at a particular church. It does not account for such variables as less frequent attendance and first-time attenders. But it does reinforce the false impression that church attendance in the region is as strong today as it was in the past.

Research of church attendance in the region paints a different picture. More than 60 per cent of the population is unchurched. In Marshall County, Kentucky, in which Baptists may have the largest number of churches, only 24 percent of the general population attends a Baptist church. The research that I reviewed did not say how often those who reported that they attended a Baptist church went to church.