Eclectic Christian

By Michael Bell – Previously published on InternetMonk.com

You may have heard people say that the “average” sized church in the U.S. or Canada is about 75 people. You also may have heard someone say that the “average” sized church in North America is about 185 people. Who is right? It all depends how you define “average”.

Statisticians use three terms when describing populations. “Mean”, “Median”, and a third term that won’t really enter our discussion today called “Mode”.

I have borrowed, and expanded upon, an analogy from the The National Congregations Study that was released last month, to help us understand the differences in these terms and why they are important to our understanding of churches in North America. What you will read here is U.S. data, but the numbers are very similar for the Canadian situation as well.

Imagine you are looking down a very, very long street, and all the churches of U.S. are lined up along the left side of the street from smallest to largest. In behind each church are all their Sunday morning attenders.

If you counted the grand total of everyone standing behind each church and then divided this number by the total number of churches that you see on this very long street, you would come up with a “mean” or “average” size of 184. “Mean” is usually what we mean of when we think of “average”. But this number of 184 is a very misleading number.

Lets say you start walking down the street, passing the churches with 5 people on a Sunday morning, 10 people, 15 people, 20 people. You continue walking until you have passed half of all the churches in America. Half of the churches in the U.S. are now behind you, half are still in front. The “average” church that you are standing in front of is called the “median” church. You look to see how many people are lined up behind it, and you see 75 people. That is right, half the churches in the United States have less than 75 people.

The average or “mean” church at 184 is 2.45 times the size of the average median church at 75. Why is this so? If you continue walking, you will get a better understanding of how skewed church numbers are within the United States.

So, you continue walking, past the churches of 80, 90, 100, 110. You walk until you have passed 90% of all the churches. You look to your left and you see 350 people lined up behind this church. Much to your surprise, although you have passed 90% of all the churches, over half of the churchgoers are still in front of you! This is why the “mean” is so much higher than the “median”. While most of the churches in the United States are small, most of the attenders go to large churches.
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I previously published this post on Internet Monk

I have received a lot of interest and feedback on my last two posts on Internet Monk, concerning how and when people switch between their childhood religion and their current faith. For those who have not had the opportunity to read them, you can read them here and here.

The question that I have been asked the most is about historical trends in the data. For example, from the graph that I provided you can see that about 50% of adults who were raised non-religious, subsequently joined a faith group. How has this changed over time? (For the purposes of this posting I am using the word “religious” in the way it has been used historically, that is, someone is religious if they are an adherent to a particular faith tradition.)

Bradley Wright, who teaches Sociology of Religion at the University of Connecticut, was kind enough to pass on a source of data where this was analyzed:

Fischer and Hout, in their recent book “Century of Difference” (2006) used General Social Survey data to analyze historical data about religion and childhood. For the most part, the graphs that they provide match up quite nicely with the chart that I provided. Historically, the outflows from Evangelical and Mainline Protestant church have been pretty constant over the last 100 years. Evangelicals have done a better job at retaining member than Mainline Protestants, and so over time have fared better. Typically about 75% of Evangelical 16 year olds will continue their Evangelical affiliation into adulthood. 25% will switch out, a number that is quite similar to what is seen in my chart. Catholics retention is not as strong as it used to be, but according to the Fischer and Hout data is now similar to that of Evangelicals.

The most striking change was for the non-religious. If you were raised non-religious between 1920 and about 1950 then you were more than 70% likely to join a faith group after the age of 16. This started changing rapidly in the 1960s, and by the time Fischer and Hout collected their data and published their book in 2002, the rate that at which non-religious became religious was down to 25%.

My chart, by nature of it looking at all adults regardless of age, had an averaging effect of younger adults and older adults, so my percentage of outflows from the non-religious was quite a bit higher than the 25% currently being reported by Fischer and Hout. What this means that if we were to somehow update my chart, and look at flows that were happening today, Protestant and Catholic outflows would be very similar to what you see on the chart, but outflows from the non-religious would only be about half as wide as are drawn on the chart.

These numbers should not surprise us. As my wife said to me last night, there is so much more support for the non-religious in school, media, and society in general than there was 50 years ago. It is not surprising that they are now retaining 75% of their adherents. I should also point out the trend in the non-religious retaining their adherents has not slowed. It may already be significantly higher than the 75%.

I hate being a bearer of bad news. I really do. People who know me, know that I am a pretty optimistic kind of guy. I don’t like to see that the non-religious are gaining ground. I have a lot of neighbors and co-workers who are not religious. Most of them do not see any need whatsoever for religion, or faith, or whatever you might want to call it. This is certainly a wake up call that tells me how important it is for me to live a Christ like life, to at least show them, if not tell them, that Jesus Christ is something worth considering.

As usual your thoughts and comments are welcome.