No One Goes To Church | Everyone Goes To Church
On becoming a community center that has a chapel
A new national study of religious worship attendance in America based on cell phone data supports a rather paradoxical conclusion: no one goes to church, but everyone goes to church.
Here’s the geodata from smartphones:
Everyone goes to church: 73% of people step into a religious place of worship at least once during the year on a primary day of worship
No one goes to church: Only 5% attend services weekly, and “weekly” for the purposes of the study is defined as a very generous 36 times or more in a year (even though self-reporting numbers have always been closer to 22%)
Also: On any given Sunday around 45 million are in a place of worship (the U.S. population is 330 million)
Also: A larger percentage (21%), but still less than self-reporting (22% of Americans report they attend weekly), attend monthly
Also: Easter and Christmas are 50% higher than other Sundays
And, the most fascinating data point of all:
If you broaden the set to any visit at any time to a place of worship, 100% of the cell phones stop at a place of worship in a given year
Everybody actually does go to church. Literally.
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At our church, we’ve started saying somewhat recently we are a community center with a chapel. Hundreds of people come through the church on a weekly basis, and only some of them are there for the “primary day of worship.” Some are here for warrant clinics. Others stop to get food from the Friendly Fridge or Little Free Pantry. Others drop off and pick up their children for elementary school. Others live here. Others come to cook meals to deliver to communities at parks in town.
A popular bible camp song goes,
The church is not a building
where people go to pray;
it's not made out of stick and stones,
it's not made out of clay.
The song emphasizes,
The church, it is the people
living out their lives,
called, enlightened, sanctified
for the work of Jesus Christ.
I mean, I get the point, and in fact many churches are built in such a way they probably need songs like this sung about them. They are primarily used for the “primary day of worship” and sit empty the rest of the week.
But a hyper-emphasis on church as not a building distracts from thinking creatively about built environments as crucial third places in community. We’ve so denigrated “church as building” we almost overlook churches altogether in urban planning and community development.
But… 100% of Americans go to a church in any given year. Shouldn’t this be a crucial data point for us as we plan church life together?
Let’s start with the most obvious reasons 100% of people may go to a church building on any given year. They might park at church, check a Pokestop at church, vote at a church, visit a food pantry at church, or go to a funeral or wedding at a church. None of these are related to active church membership.
But many people who do not “belong” to a church nevertheless participate in events at church. They attend AA meetings, visit on a neighborhood board game day, eat at a summer holiday picnic, organize with the local Food Not Bombs group, or serve through a ministry of the church.
Not all churches are going to be particularly well-situated to embrace the breadth of these uses. If churches hyper-prioritize worship as the main purpose for the building, and if the primary focus of their mission is proselytization and a drive toward worship attendance, then the hyper-focus of their design will be on those uses for a building.
Progressive churches may be particularly well-suited to approach designing the physical spaces they inhabit to encourage neighborly love, healing, etc. Good Shepherd Lutheran Church (the congregation I have now served for thirteen years as pastor) has, according to one young member, “been designed with a high level of intentionality and you can feel it.”
I think that’s right. But you can also observe how church mission focus has shifted over the years and approaches to design have changed. The church started as a small sanctuary, then in later years expanded with a larger sanctuary. Finally, about twenty years ago a special center was added to the building, a multi-purpose room the size of a basketball court, plus a stage, multiple classrooms, and a kitchen.
In these stages of the development of the church, it was clear the church believe a building was first of all for worship, and then with the addition of the center, a space for education and congregational activities.
More recently, we have slowly been adding design elements that focus more outwardly, serving the neighborhood as a whole. These include the Little Free Pantry (the LFP movement started at GSLC and has now spread to every continent on the planet), an outdoor labyrinth accessible to the neighborhood, a columbarium (where ashes of those who have died can be committed and a public space for prayer and worship), a Friendly Fridge, enough solar panels to provide all our electrical needs, and now most recently a shower facility.
Next on the agenda is converting more of our space to provide shelter for LGBTQIA+ experiencing houselessness, and if we can, upgrading one of our kitchens to a commercial level so it can be used as a teaching kitchen and for more easily prepared community meals.
Even those portions of the church that had been centered around worship are now shifting toward community center use. We rent the center out to a neighboring Marshallese church who had lost their lease, have converted some classrooms into the Rainbow Closet (a gender-affirming clothing exchange), use our space to host community focused camps, and have started a whole additional ministry, Ozark Atolls, that provides community resources for the Marshallese community.
Meanwhile, all around our church the city is changing. Our city opened a food recycling station in our church parking lot and right next to it installed a large flood mitigation ditch to address water management issues nearby. On the other side of the church new housing is going up. We are serving in a neighborhood where all the conversations about “New Urbanism” hit the ground and apply.
But returning to the data with which we started, that 100% of Americans visit a church each year. Here’s what has begun to intrigue me in the conversation on New Urbanism…
Churches don’t show up.
Like, if you read a book about new urbanism, it doesn’t include churches (read this, for example). If you look at maps and plans, they don’t assume churches. It’s literally as if in the new urbanism, churches aren’t part of the built environment.
But why?
Well, we should first note many approaches to new urbanism are definitely aligned with the values of Christianity. For example, it’s no accident that our congregation AND our city both built sustainable solar power installations in approximately the same period.
In fact, local churches should likely champion many of the impulses of new urbanism, from walkability to sustainability to the commitment to community and neighborliness.
But I’m asking about the buildings themselves.
You know. Church buildings.
Where should they appear in the new urbanism? Or how should they be rehabilitated or made new?
I can only conclude that churches are absent from the built environment imagined by new urbanists either because a) new urbanists are largely agnostic, or b) the church has made itself mostly irrelevant to local neighborhoods.
For the time-being, I’m going to drop “a)” and let new urbanists answer this question for themselves. I don’t know how many of them are agnostic. Maybe their religiosity goes so deep that the faith is embedded in the new urbanism itself and churches become superfluous (in which case I’d invite them to look at our church building and how it is used as counter-argument against sublimating churches).
But I can speak to “b)” and there, the answer is resoundingly YES. Churches have made themselves mostly irrelevant to local neighborhoods. I’ve discovered repeatedly over the course of my career as a pastor that people in the neighborhood have no idea what the churches right next door to them are up to, or who goes there.
For churches to impact new urbanism, they will need to do at least three things.
Become actively involved in the planning their own neighborhood. When proposals for bike lanes are reviewed, or the city commission makes long range plans for intentional growth, wise churches will be present, articulate, and helpful. As the church.
Think of their church building as integral to the built environment of their city, and remodel accordingly. Maybe this means redesigning the parking lot to better manage waste water. Or maybe it means turning a portion of the grounds into a park with a labyrinth that encourages meditation. Or re-design the public spaces on the church property to meet emerging needs—construction of tiny homes would be a recent example. It might even mean that the church members intentionally live within walking distance of the church, and then walk to church, much like Sabbath-observing Jewish communities (and to make this work many churches would have to address housing affordability issues in their own neighborhoods).
Push for policies and plans in their city that contribute not just to the good of new urbanism, but to justice in the city. Let’s be honest, a lot of new urbanism is class confined. So churches will play a crucial role in encouraging the development of truly affordable housing, as well as the development of resources for the homeless and marginally housed.
Churches can add to the conversation by creatively proposing church as “public space” or exploring how it is important third space, spiritual space.
So too, we can consider additional issues of justice that the church will likely center more frequently than new urbanists, beholden as they are to moneyed and political interests.
“For church buildings to recover their place at the center of neighborhoods and urban environments, there will have to be a conscious effort born from an awareness of the cultural crisis in our country. The Congress for the New Urbanists (CNU) is a non-partisan and non-sectarian organization that can support any community, including religious communities, interested in urbanism. New Urbanists, Bess asserts, need to avoid becoming a tool of the real estate industry and make themselves available to cultural and religious institutions. Historically, religious communities have been patrons of good architecture and urbanism. More recently, the New Urbanists have already worked on projects that have overcome the problems of zoning ordinances, street design, and parking regulation by obtaining a designation of an area as a Traditional Neighborhood District (TND), which overrides the established legal structure. These projects necessarily involve public processes in which local church communities could certainly take part” (from Building Jerusalem by Kathleen Curran Sweeney).
Finally, let’s return to that other data point and reality: no one goes to church.
The number of people in our culture who now attend church weekly, the committed core, is about 5% of the population. That’s not huge.
Or is it. Because a lot of social change scholars now say you only need 3 percent for critical mass.
“The Innovisor team was responsible for creating the "3 percent rule." A company of network scientists (and the 3 percent number has also been identified by social movement researchers), which states that a critical mass of just 3 percent of the population is required to generate major change in many situations, is another important element in successful change. Successful social movements throughout history, like the civil rights movement and the LGBTQ rights movement, have adhered to this norm.
According to the 3 percent rule, a small but devoted group of people can bring about change through deliberate, long-term effort. This can include organizing protests, gathering supporters, and getting their message out through social media and other channels
The American fight for civil rights is a great example of how the 3 percent rule works. Martin Luther King Jr. and a small core of other committed activists served as the movement's leaders. They were able to get more people to support them because they planned their actions and used persuasive language.” (Dr. J. Bruce Stewart).
Then, once you have the 3%, the next benchmark is the 25% tipping point, when a quarter of a group agrees with a certain point of view or acts in a certain way, it can become the new norm.
Well, that’s not far off from how many Americans attend church monthly.
Finally, the rule of 150. The Dunbar rule. You can really only know 150 well. Well, the church I’ve been describing, GSLC, isn’t far off from that number in terms of active members. And we find it’s a highly effective size, small enough to be nimble, large enough to have impact.
I guess that’s a lot of statistical analysis just to show how a normal little church even in the era of decline, when no one goes to church anymore, can still take us all to church.