Concerns about spiking COVID-19 cases led to a rise in the number of U.S. churches canceling in-person gatherings in January, a new Lifeway Research study shows. Meanwhile, the new research offers some of the most detailed data yet about how…
Often, faith and work collide for African immigrants in the U.S.
In November 2016, when he set out on a trip to the United States from his country of Nigeria, Ferdinand Okeke took with him a Bible. It represented more than an item for him; it was an article of faith….
Hybrid church is probably here to stay, but some things don’t translate well to digital
If you’re wondering whether the pandemic and online church will have a lasting effect on how churches operate, new research from Barna indicates the answer is a definitive yes. While most churchgoing Americans long to be back in their physical…
What if they don’t all come back to church?
Slumping church attendance is not a new trend for a majority of North American churches. The conventional wisdom may be to blame the previous decade’s slips on the younger generations, but in reality, the North American exodus from church is…
Americans want churches open but aren’t attending when they are open
Americans believe churches shouldn’t have special privileges to be open when other similar venues are closed, but they also believe their churches should be open already — even though few people are actually attending in-person worship. These seemingly contradictory views…
How our church doubled our Wednesday night attendance in one week
If Sunday and midweek attendance patterns are not going back to the 1950s, then every church should consider creative ways to engage people in the culture as it exists, not the culture in which our grandparents lived.
In U.S., post-Christian cities overtaking Bible-believing urban areas
Used to be, research and polling organizations interested in American religious life regularly documented how much Christians are, or aren’t, going to church. The Barna Group did just that in a recent survey which found that residents of Chattanooga, Tenn.;…
What if church doesn’t matter?
Americans are a remarkably faithful people when it comes to spirituality, yet they are simultaneously, remarkably faithless when it comes to institutional religion. Why? This perplexity borders on cliché since it has been true for a number of years, but…
Women are leaving church, and the reason seems clear
The years that women’s church attendance began to decline are the very years when religious leaders in the Catholic Church and the evangelical movement fused religion with the culture wars.