I often think about that insightful statement I read somewhere to the effect that America is a nation of Indians under a ruling class of Swedes. (It’s actually from sociologist Peter Berger).

It got me thinking about how different the average American is from the way he/she is portrayed in Hollywood or in the mainstream media.  Church hardly figures in the media except as the object of raised-eyebrows and patronizing smiles, if not outright scorn.

But a large percentage of the population goes to church and goes regularly. One in five goes every single week-end.

That says something. I am a believing Christian but I go only a handful of times in a year, although there are reasons for my lack of attendance that probably don’t hold good for most people.

Anyway, here are the numbers:

Q: What’s the size of U.S. churches?
A: The median church in the U.S. has 75 regular participants in worship on Sunday mornings, according to the National Congregations Study (NCS) http://www.soc.duke.edu/natcong/ . Notice that researchers measured the median church size — the point at which half the churches are smaller and half the churches are larger — rather than the average (186 attenders reported by the USCLS survey http://www.uscongregations.org/charact-cong.htm ), which is larger due to the influence of very large churches. But while the United States has a large number of very small churches, most people attend larger churches. The National Congregations Study estimated that the smaller churches draw only 11 percent of those who attend worship. Meanwhile, 50 percent of churchgoers attended the largest 10% of congregations (350 regular participants and up).
Want to know more? Check the websites for the National Congregations Study (NCS) at http://www.soc.duke.edu/natcong/ The US Congregational Life Survey (USCLS) website has statistics about congregations by religious traditions at http://www.uscongregations.org/ The Faith Communities Today national study of churches www.faithcommunitiestoday.org 2010 study also contains size and other congregational findings.

Approximate Distribution of U.S. Protestant and Other Christian Churches by size *based on NCS study
(excluding Catholic/Orthodox)

ATTENDANCE	# OF CHURCHES	WEEKLY WORSHIPERS	PERCENT
7-99	177,000	9 million	59%
100-499	105,000	25 million	35%
500-999	12,000	9 million	4%
1,000-1,999	6,000	8 million	2%
2,000-9,999	1,170	4 million	.4%
10,000-plus	40	.7 million	.01%
TOTALS	approx. 300,000	approx. 56 million	100%

 

Q: How many people go to church each Sunday?
A: For years, the Gallup Research Organization has come up with a consistent figure — 40 percent of all Americans, or roughly 118 million people, who said they attended worship on the previous weekend. Recently, sociologists of religion have questioned that figure, saying Americans tend to exaggerate how often they attend. By actually counting the number of people who showed up at representative sample of churches, two researchers, Kirk Hadaway and Penny Marler found that only 20.4 percent of the population, or half the Gallup figure, attended church each weekend.
As added proof for the accuracy of this smaller percentage of churchgoers, if 20.4% of Americans (approximately 63 million in 2010) attended the nation’s 350,000 congregations weekly then the average attendance would be 180 people per congregation which is almost exactly the figure that numerous research studies have found.”