Surprising Stats in New Church Research
Mission America Coalition

ST LOUIS, Mo., Oct. 12—Attendance at American churches is less than half of what we have believed in the past, 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 with groundbreaking new research about the state of the American church. Instead of relying on limited survey data which is then extrapolated to the entire 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 much more accurate picture of what is 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 told nearly 170 national church, ministry, and lay leaders gathered.

According to Olson's research, overall church attendance is virtually unchanged from 15 years ago, even though the United States 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 five years. Even in the southern states, the traditional Bible Belt, the population is growing faster than the church. “Having information about actual attendance at churches in individual communities is a significant leap forward by itself,” said Jim Overholt, executive director of the Coalition, “but even more important is that we can now overlay the church data with census and other demographic information to tell us more about the dynamics of change within income, education, and other key sociological indicators that are also available by zip code.” the rest