Generational Shift in Church Attendance
In 200,1 The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America did a large study looking at who attends worship in ELCA congregations. In this graphic you see church attendance by age group in the blue bars. The black line marks the percentage of the US population for the same age groups. What we see is that older people make up the majority of the ELCA and young people are noticeably absent, particularly when compared against the general US population.
The common wisdom has been is that what we see in this graph is young people sowing their wild oats and eventually they will gather their senses, get married, have kids, move out to the suburbs and start going to church again. However, this seems to be a case of wishful thinking, and what we are seeing is a massive change in church attendance practices among generations. George Barna sorts worship attendance by generation.
Mosaics are less likely than any other generation to volunteer time to their church (12% of Mosaics report volunteering). Conversely, 23% of Busters, 29% of Boomers, 34% of Elders (Builders and Seniors) have volunteered at a church in the past week. (2006)
33% Mosaics, 43% of Busters, 49% of Boomers, 53% of Elders attend church on a given Sunday. (2006)
(Mosaics - those born between 1984 and 2002, Buster - those born between 1965 and 1983, Boomer - those born between 1946 and 1964, Builders - those born between 1927 and 1945, Senior - those born in 1926 and earlier)
Through the sociology work of Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone and the work of Pippa Norris & Ronald Inglehart in Sacred and Secular, we see that religious habits of people within a generation don’t change much over their lifetimes. People who tend go to church continue to go to church, and people who don’t usually don’t start, and there isn’t a great deal of change in those groups. What this means is the idea that people will return to church in later life is a myth. For the ELCA, this means as older generations die, they will not be replaced by younger people. Thus, it is likely the ELCA will dramatically shrink in membership over the next 10-20 years.
It seems unlikely that younger generations are going to start attending worship in greater numbers than they currently are. However, worship attendance does not tell the whole story of faith in the US. The Baylor Religion Survey: American Piety in the 21st Century, reports that even though 49% of Americans reported attending church in the last month, 85%-90% of Americans believe in God, nearly 82% identify themselves as Christians, and 71% pray at least once a week. Even among people unaffiliated with a church there is still some latent faith; with 62% of unaffiliated people believing in God and 31% praying at least occasionally. Among 18-30 year olds, 18% report being unaffiliated; the highest of any generational group. While, belief and prayer rates may be lower among the younger generations even in the unaffiliated group, it seems clear that belief and prayer practices are much more common than worship attendance.
While worship has been a primary focus for congregations, for younger generations, worship is much less of a connecting point. For congregations that want to make their resources available to young people, worship will be a decreasingly effective delivery tool. So the question becomes, how do you develop a community of faith in which worship attendance is not a primary goal or a measurement of success? I don’t have a lot of answers yet, but it seems clear that this is the future of faith practice in the US.