Category: Leadership Journal’s Out of Ur blog

Free Churches and Liturgical Churches: Behind the Numbers

Post author By Andy Rowell
Post date November 2, 2009

My post is up at Christianity Today's Leadership Journal Out of Ur blog:

Catalyst, Liturgy, and Innovation What liturgical church leaders and the Catalyst Conference can learn from each other.

It has also been published in a slightly different form at Duke Divinity School's Faith & Leadership website on the Call & Response blog:

What Liturgical and Free Church leaders can learn from each other.

Make your comments there. Thanks.

Free Churches and Liturgical Churches: Behind the Numbers

The first two sentences in the post attempt to show that there is a significant split in the United States between liturgical churches and free churches.

According to data from the National Congregations Study (2006-2007), 38%
of people in the United States associate themselves with liturgical
churches (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, etc.); while 46%
associate themselves with free churches (Baptist, Pentecostal,
non-denominational, etc.). The 14% of people associated with Methodist
and Reformed/Presbyterian churches sit atop this watershed—some sliding
down the liturgical slope, others down the free church slope.

The data I draw from in these sentences is from the following chart. I have marked the liturgical numbers yellow, free church numbers pink and Reformed/Methodist green.

Explore the Data: Wave 2 – 2006/07

Denomination
Response	Frequency	Percent	Valid Percent	Cumulative Percent
ROMAN CATHOLIC	421	27.9	27.9
BAPTIST	312	20.7	20.7	48.7
METHODIST	136	9.1	9.1	57.7
LUTHERAN	77	5.1	5.1	62.9
PRESBYTERIAN OR REFORMED	68	4.5	4.5	67.3
PENTECOSTAL	84	5.6	5.6	73.0
OTHER MODERATE OR LIBERAL PROTESTANTS	26	1.7	1.7	74.6
EPISCOPAL CHURCH	43	2.9	2.9	77.5
OTHER CONSERVATIVE, EVANGELICAL, OR SECTARIAN PROTESTANTS	97	6.5	6.5	84.0
OTHER CHRISTIAN, NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED	191	12.7	12.7	96.7
NON-CHRISTIAN	50	3.3	3.3	100.0

NOTE: this table reflects the number of persons in congregations.

To get it:

I went to the National Congregations home page.
Clicked explore the data
Clicked on Basic Findings for each Variable in the Surveys: Wave 2: 2006-2007 data
Clicked under the Variables. "Denomiation."
Clicked: "I want my tables to reflect the number of persons in congregations"
Clicked: Create Frequency Table.

The same information is presented slightly differently on page 27 of The National Congregations Study report "American Congregations at the Beginning of the 21st Century" by Mark Chaves

RELIGIOUS TRADITION:
Percent with no denominational affiliation 13.9

    Percent associated with each denomination or tradition:
Roman Catholic                                                                 27.9
Baptist conventions/denominations                                   20.7
Methodist denominations                                                    9.1
Lutheran/Episcopal denominations                                     7.9
Pentecostal                                                                         5.6
Denominations in the reformed tradition                             4.5
Other Christian                                                                  20.9
Jewish                                                                                  1.6
Non-Christian and Non-Jewish                                             1.7

I reflected on the Report at:

Two new reports: Thumma / Bird on Megachurches and Chaves on American Congregations

Duke sociologist Mark Chaves has written the 2004 Harvard University Press book:

More raw unweighted data is available at:

National Congregations Study, Cumulative Dataset (1998 and 2006-2007)

From this type of data (if it was properly weighted), one would begin to form the chart above.

9) Denominational affiliation (collapsed 1) (DENCODE)

	TOTAL	%
0) No denomination	313	11.4
1) Roman Catholic	663	24.2
2) Southern Baptist Convention	285	10.4
3) Black Baptist	91	3.3
4) American Baptist Churches	26	0.9
5) Other Baptist	120	4.4
6) United Methodist Church	245	8.9
7) Black Methodist	23	0.8
8) Other Methodist	9	0.3
9) Evangelical Lutheran Church in America	111	4.1
10) Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod	52	1.9
11) Other Lutheran	19	0.7
12) Presbyterian Church (USA)	82	3.0
13) Other Presbyterian	9	0.3
14) Assembly of God	48	1.8
15) Other Pentecostal	54	2.0
16) Church of God in Christ	21	0.8
17) Disciples of Christ	17	0.6
18) Episcopal Church	77	2.8
19) United Church of Christ	51	1.9
20) Reformed Church in America	8	0.3
21) Church of the Brethren	7	0.3
22) Jehovah's Witness	28	1.0
23) Mennonite	7	0.3
24) Church of the Nazarene	20	0.7
25) Seventh-day Adventists	15	0.5
26) Unitarian Universalist Association	16	0.6
27) Eastern Orthodox	13	0.5
28) Church/Churches of Christ	16	0.6
29) Various Church of God	26	0.9
30) Latter-day Saints (LDS, Mormon)	45	1.6
31) Jewish	45	1.6
32) Non-Christian/non-Jewish	53	1.9
35) Evangelical	13	0.5
36) Christian and Missionary Alliance	13	0.5
37) Other Mainline/Liberal	9	0.3
38) Other Conservative/Evangelical	34	1.2
39) Other Christian, nec	56	2.0
TOTAL	2740	100.0

[ Add to Question Bank | View Question Bank ]

Ecclesiology Leadership Journal's Out of Ur blog Megachurches Missiology Missional Sociology

The research behind my post at Out of Ur: Missional vs. Attractional: Debating the Research

Post author By Andy Rowell
Post date December 16, 2008

See the post I coauthored with the editors of Leadership Journal at the Out of Ur blog:

Missional vs. Attractional: Debating the Research
What do the numbers say? It depends who you ask.

by Url Scaramanga & Andy Rowell

Summary:

In the comments of a recent post, Scot McKnight, David Fitch, Dan Kimball and Alan Hirsch argued about what the church stats say. They called for evidence. So in this post, I lay out some quantitative data that is relevant to the discussion. (See my Following Dan Kimball's Missional vs. Megachurch conversation to get caught up on the chronology of the discussion). The evidence I present is not decisive for "either side" but it sheds light on what we know and don't know. My point is merely that we need to be careful about making broad claims about where the church is growing and declining. I agree that we need to be reasonably informed about sociology but that our direction comes from theology.

Here are the footnotes that they edited out:

Scott Thumma and Dave Travis, Beyond Megachurch Myths: What We Can Learn from America's Largest Churches (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 124-125.

Stanley Presser and Mark Chaves, "Is Religious Service Attendance Declining?" Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46 (2007): 417.

Rodney Stark, What Americans Really Believe (Waco: Baylor, 2008), 14.

Scott Thumma and Dave Travis, Beyond Megachurch Myths: What We Can Learn from America's Largest Churches (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 8-9.

Notes about interpreting David Olson's The American Church in Crisis statistics:

As I have noted before, David Olson's research is principally based on statistics from 20 or so denominations. It tells us something but not necessarily about all churches in the U.S.

The quote in the article from Olson was not suggested by me but by the Leadership Journal editors. It is from the following piece:

Rebecca Barnes and Lindy Lowry, "The American Church in Crisis", Outreach magazine, May/June 2006.

The claims by Olson are also made in his book:

David T. Olson, The American Church in Crisis: Groundbreaking Research Based on a National Database of over 200,000 Churches (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).

Olson tallies together headcounts from denominations and based on that argues that the attendance number is fairly stable but the American population is growing. First, I do not think his numbers adequately represent independent churches and smaller denominations. Second, I know of no other researcher who depends on headcounts as Olson does with so little clarification about establishing a comprehensive methodology.

D. Michael Lindsay, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University, notes in response to Olson's research:

"Counting heads to estimate weekly worship service attendance is far less reliable than estimates based on survey responses . . . For researchers to generalize head counts to the entire adult population, they must be conducted as an exhaustive consensus or a representative sample."

D. Michael Lindsay, "Gallup's Research Remains More Reliable Than Counting Heads," Rev. Magazine (Mar/Apr 2008): 59.

It should be said that I appreciate Olson's research for what it does tell us and I used it in my previous post "Megachurch Misinformation" at Out of Ur. For example, one can look at the church planting statistics from 10 denominations. These stats do not tell us about church planting in America comprehensively but give a nice snapshot.

Additional notes about young adults:

I do not mean in the Out of Ur post to paint a rosy picture of American Christianity. As Andy Crouch notes in the comments, there is no room for complacency.

Robert Wuthnow points out that frequent church attendance among young adults is down from 31 percent in the 1970s to 25 percent more recently.

Wuthnow writes,

Specifically, 6 percent of younger adults [age 21-45] in the recent period [1998, 2000, 2002 GSS] claim that they attend religious services more than once a week, compared with 7 percent in the earlier period [1972-1976], and 14 percent in the in the recent period claim they attend every week down from 19 percent previously. At the other extreme, 20 percent say they never attend, compared with only 14 percent earlier. How should we think about these changes? On the one hand, it is important not to exaggerate their significance. In many ways, younger adults at the start of the twenty-first century are like younger adults in the early 1970s. If we count as 'regular' attenders, those who participate nearly every week or more often, only a quarter (25 percent) of younger adults can be considered regular attenders now, and fewer than a third (31 percent) were in the early 1970s. The majority of younger adults either attend religious service rarely, or if they attend more than that, are hardly regular enough to be the core of any congregation. On the other hand, the fact that regular attenders now characterize only 25 percent of younger adults, whereas this proportion was 31 percent in the 1970s represents a decline that cannot easily be dismissed.

Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 52-53.

Conclusion:

I love all kinds of churches. All need to be continually evaluated by good theology.

As I said in my earlier post Megachurch Misinformation,

All of us want "more and better disciples of Jesus" (a phrase I first
heard from Brian McLaren). In the Church of England, they are talking
about a "mixed economy" of "fresh expressions" of church being a good
thing–in other words different churches will reach different people. I
am hopeful about both missional and megachurch expressions of church.

Related:

Following Dan Kimball’s Missional vs. Megachurch conversation

Post author By Andy Rowell
Post date December 6, 2008

Dan Kimball provoked a response with his post at Christianity Today's Leadership Journal blog. Here is some of the response in chronological order. You can put in the comments any posts I have missed but put "reaction" comments on one of the other blogs as I intend this post just to be an index.

December 2, 2008

Dan Kimball's Missional Misgivings

Small, indigenous churches are getting lots of attention, but where's the fruit?

Dan is a pastor and author of Emerging Church and They Like Jesus, But Not the Church

Brother Maynard of Winnipeg, Manitoba responded to Dan's article at:

Missional Misgivings, or Missional Misunderstandings?

December 4, 2008

Megachurch Misinformation

Mega or missional? The stats say both are doing well.

by Andy Rowell