Nationwide Church Attendance Said To Be Less Than Half of Previous Estimates
Overall U.S. church attendance is calculated to be 20% (60 million) of the current population (300 million), virtually unchanged from 15 years ago, even though the U.S. population has grown by 52 million people -- mostly unchurched. The northeast U.S. is the only region where the church is growing faster than the population, and no state has seen a net increase in the percentage of church attendance in the last 5 years. Even in the southern states, the traditional Bible Belt, the population is growing faster than the church. These statistics are according to Dave Olson, director of church planting for the Evangelical Covenant Church, and director of the American Church Research Project. Olson addressed the Mission America Coalition annual conference on its closing day about the state of the American church. Instead of relying on limited survey data which is then extrapolated to the entire population (which has resulted in reporting the attendance figure to be 40% of the population), Olson has worked for years to build a database of actual recorded attendance in over 300,000 churches across America. His vision was to present a more accurate picture of what's really happening to the American church at both the national and local levels, and with information refined down to individual zip codes. "I'm not relying on what people say, I'm measuring their actual behavior," he says.... http://www.zondervan.com/Cultures/en-US/ZCS/CLB/Surprising+Stats+in+Church+Research.htm
