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Barna — A New Perspective on Unchurched March 6, 2008

Posted by Steve in : Breaking News, Church, Urban Church, Methods & Strategies, Missional, The Cultural Conversation, Internet Resources , trackback

According to a new study released by The Barna Group, popular measures such as the percentage of people who are “unchurched” - based on attendance at a conventional church service - are out of date. Various new forms of faith community and experience, such as house churches, marketplace ministries and cyberchurches, must be figured into the mix - and make calculating the percentage of Americans who can be counted as “unchurched” more complicated. 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. According to Barna, one way of examining people’s participation in faith communities is by exploring how they practice their corporate faith engagement. Unveiling a new measurement model, Barna identified the following five segments:

Unattached - people who had attended neither a conventional church nor an organic faith community (e.g., house church, simple church, intentional community) during the past year. Some of these people use religious media, but they have had no personal interaction with a regularly-convened faith community. This segment represents one out of every four adults (23%) in America. About one-third of the segment was people who have never attended a church at any time in their life.

Intermittents - these adults are essentially “under-churched” - i.e., people who have participated in either a conventional church or an organic faith community within the past year, but not during the past month. Such people constitute about one out of every seven adults (15%). About two-thirds of this group had attended at least one church event at some time within the past six months.

Homebodies - people who had not attended a conventional church during the past month, but had attended a meeting of a house church (3%).

Blenders - adults who had attended both a conventional church and a house church during the past month. Most of these people attend a conventional church as their primary church, but many are experimenting with new forms of faith community. In total, Blenders represent 3% of the adult population.

Conventionals - adults who had attended a conventional church (i.e., a congregational-style, local church) during the past month but had not attended a house church. Almost three out of every five adults (56%) fit this description. This participation includes attending any of a wide variety of conventional-church events, such as weekend services, mid-week services, special events, or church-based classes.

Who Are These Unattached?

With the final weeks of the Easter season rapidly approaching, the Barna study also identified some of the characteristics of the Unattached that might enable conventional churches or other ministries to more adeptly connect with those people. Compared to regular churchgoers, the Unattached are:

  • more likely to feel stressed out
  • less likely to be concerned about the moral condition of the nation
  • much less likely to believe that they are making a positive difference in the world
  • less optimistic about the future
  • far less likely to believe that the Bible is totally accurate in its principles
  • substantially more likely to believe that Satan and the Holy Spirit are symbolic figures, but are not real
  • more likely to believe that Jesus Christ sinned while He was on earth
  • much more likely to believe that the holy literature of the major faiths all teach the same principles even though they use different stories
  • less likely to believe that a person can be under demonic influence
  • more likely to describe their sociopolitical views as “mostly liberal” than “mostly conservative”

    • Six out of ten adults in the Unattached category (59%) consider themselves to be Christian. Even more surprising was the revelation that 17% 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. A significant proportion of the Unattached engages in traditional faith activities during a typical week. For instance, one-fifth (19%) read the Bible and three out of every five (62%) pray to God during a typical week.

    The Unattached distinguished themselves from the churched population demographically, too. They are more likely to be single, male, and to have been divorced at some point. They are also less likely to be registered to vote, which is often a sign of people who feel less connected to or influential in society

    What does going to church look like for you? Do you feel some of the unattached characteristics in your life? How do you think “going to church” will look over the next ten or twenty years as our world gets smaller with technology? Could you see yourself watching a whole service over the internet?

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