A new survey has broken down America’s church attendance to reflect the growing number of “church” options that have redefined how Christians worship on Sunday.
Beyond traditional church, American Christians are increasingly adopting new forms of faith community such as house churches, marketplace ministries and cyberchurches. The new Barna survey, released Monday, takes into account these “church” options and contends that popular measures such as the percentage of people who are “unchurched” – based on attendance at a conventional church service – are out of date.
“The fact that millions of people are now involved in multiple faith communities – for instance, attending a conventional church one week, a house church the next, and interacting with an online faith community in-between – has rendered the standard measures of “churched” and “unchurched” much less precise,” The Barna Group noted.
As a result, the Christian polling group created a new measurement model with five types of people: unattached, intermittents, homebodies, blenders and conventionals.
Unattached are people who attended neither a conventional church nor a live faith organization during the past year. This includes house church, simple church, intentional community. Some of these people use religious media, but they do not have personal interaction with a regularly-convened faith community.
This group of people represents one out of every four adults (23 percent) in America. About one-third of the segment has never attended a church ever in their life.
Intermittents are those who have participated in a conventional church or live faith community within the past year, but not during the past month. About one out of every seven adults (15 percent) belongs in this category. About two-thirds of this group attended at least one church event within the past six months.
Meanwhile, homebodies are people who have not attended a conventional church during the past month, but have attended a house church meeting (three percent).
Then there are the blenders who attended both a conventional church and a house church during the past month. Most of these people attend the traditional church as their primary church, but are also experimenting with new forms of faith community. In total, blenders represent three percent of the adult population.
But most of America still fit the conventional churchgoer description – someone who attended a conventional church during the past month but had not attended a house church. Almost three out of every five adults (56 percent) fit this description. Participation includes attending a wide variety of conventional church events, such as weekend services, mid-week services, special events, or church-based classes.
Six out of 10 adults in the unattached category (59 percent) consider themselves to be Christian. Moreover, 17 percent of the unattached are born again Christians – defined as people who have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that they consider to be very important in their life, and who believe that they will experience Heaven after they die because they have confessed their sins and accepted Christ as their savior.
