c. 1996 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Church attendance has suffered a five-year decline and sunk to its lowest level in two decades, according to research by the Barna Research Group of Glendale, Calif.

“From the early ’80s to the early ’90s, there has been a definite change,” said the Rev. Bruce Hose, who was director of Sunday school programs for the 1 million-member Alabama Baptist Convention from 1985-95. “Not only has attendance gone down but it is a graying culture, a graying congregation.”

Hose said the Assemblies of God, Southern Baptists and some other denominations have continued to make membership gains, but much of the growth is focused in the megachurches.

In telephone surveys of 1,004 U.S. adults 18 and over, Barna Research Group said 37 percent of Americans now report going to church on a given Sunday. Attendance peaked in 1991 at 49 percent and dropped to 47 percent in 1992, 45 percent in 1993 and 42 percent in 1994 and 1995, according to the Barna poll numbers.

“Increasingly, we are seeing Christian churches lose entire segments of the population: men, singles, empty nesters … and people who were raised in mainline Protestant churches,” wrote pollster George Barna.

“If his poll data is right, it’s even worse than what we think we have found,” said Samford University researcher Penny Long Marler, who has taken part in studies that have shown that actual church attendance is only about half of that indicated by telephone polls. “It may be where we’re heading.”

Many churches have been lulled into a false sense of security for years by Gallup poll figures that appeared to show church attendance remaining constant, Hose said.

Gallup polls have remained steady for three decades in reporting that about 43 percent of people say in telephone surveys that they attended church the previous week, Marler said.

But with the increasing population, a steady 43 percent church attendance should have resulted in a massive influx of people for the nation’s churches. “That’s clearly not been the case,” Marler said. “Clearly something has been fishy about the polling.”

Mainline Protestant churches have lost millions of members over the past three decades. Growth at evangelical Protestant churches has not nearly been large enough to offset those losses, Marler said.

Many baby boomers who returned to church while rearing their children now have stopped attending since their children have grown up and left home, said Barna Research Group spokesman Dave Kinnaman. “That’s certainly a factor,” he said.

The peak in church attendance in 1991 probably had much to do with the Persian Gulf War, the breakdown of the Soviet Union and economic recession, Kinnaman said.

“Those types of issues formed a climate conducive to church attendance,” he said. Also influencing increased church attendance was the Willow Creek Community Church model, a trend in “seeker sensitive” church services based on the corporate-style approach of the suburban Chicago congregation.

That model may have lost some of its novelty appeal, Kinnaman said.

But Marler of Samford, whose studies have pointed out the difference in actual behavior and what people tell pollsters, warned that such fluctuations in polling numbers can be because of sampling error.

She said it’s very clear, however, that America’s church attendance habit has faded.

“All denominations, including conservative Protestants, have grown slower,” she said. “There has been a very large decline in instititional religion.”

She has teamed with other researchers to study the nation’s 78 million “marginal” Protestants who claim a traditional religious identity but are not active in churches.

“There are really very few people who do not identify with anything,” she said. “They’re still saying `I’m a Baptist’ _ but they don’t belong to a local church and they don’t go.”

Young people are confused about morals and not familiar with religious tradition, and the global youth culture has become pluralistic and relativistic, she said. “I don’t think anybody’s doing much to help them sort it out,” she said.

“It’s not just a phase they’re going through,” Marler said. “There’s less of a reason to say they’ll come back when they never went in the first place. The reserves of religious tradition are dwindling.”

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The United States may be following many other secular nations by becoming a society without rigorous systems of religious education in which churches, temples and mosques serve as moral training grounds.

“It’s a valuable tool for moral and ethical training,” Marler said. A relativistic youth culture, without a core ethical tradition, could make for a troublesome society, she said.

“I’m not sure what kind of person it would form,” Marler said. “We’ve never tried it.”

For a book called “Unchurched Faith” to be published by Abingdon Press, Marler and other researchers have studied people under 35 who do not attend church.

She cites a 25-year-old Atlanta man whose parents divorced by the time he was 12. He lived with one parent, then with the other, attended college and is living with his girlfriend.

“He has tried going to churches because it’s still considered the thing to do, but he feels out of place and awkward,” Marler said. “He doesn’t know the cues for what to do in a worship service.”

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In most churches, Sunday school lessons are prepared for people who have been in such classes since childhood, not for youth never exposed to church, she said. “Kids like that are just lost,” Marler said. “What religious education they’ve got is from pop media. That’s an issue churches are going to have to grapple with.”

For the 35-and-under group, who are very often children of divorced parents, Marler’s studies are showing that glitzy, media savvy worship is not what they seem to want.

“They were interested in a small church like their grandparents went to, where they can have personal relationships,” Marler said. “That kind of surprised us. We thought they would have been interested in entertainment. They’ve got entertainment. It doesn’t help them with life problems.”

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More churches are moving toward intensifying the visual experience in their worship services, along the lines of Willow Creek Community Church, which plans sermons out a year ahead and has original dramas and music written to supplement the message, Hose said.

He points to the movie “Sister Act,” in which a dull church was infused with new energy. “That had a real message to the churches of today,” he said.

Most churches are a foreign world to youths who didn’t grow up in a church culture, Hose said. There’s a certain language spoken, songs are sung that were written 100 years ago and organ music is played. “There is definitely a generational issue the church must deal with,” he said.

But he said churches must have faith in what got them started and hope they can recapture it.

“The power of the gospel is still relevant,” he said. “The truth of the gospel cuts through.”

JC END GARRISON