Faith Works 7-15-22

Faith Works 7-15-22
Jeff Gill

In Many Cases, Most People Don't
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Most people go to church. Most people who go to church go to megachurches.

Except they don't.

I was starting last week to talk about some of our misconceptions about what everyone does, what people do, or so we think.

A quick run of the numbers puts the regular churchgoer figure for our county, which I'd argue is not far from the averages nationwide, at or below one in five, some 20%. Which means four of five don't. An evangelistic opportunity on one level, a bracing reality check on another.

And the stats get tricky but for Protestants, maybe one in five of those who are going to church go to the really big ones. Megachurch is variously defined, to the point of confusion; average weekend attendance over 2,000 used to be a data gathering standard. I like to point out that, by this metric, a near majority of Catholic parishes are megachurch-ish, at least in size, but I'm just pestering Protestants for the moment. Multi-site has become bigger than getting cavernous and higher in the thousands, but the visibility of megachurches makes them more influential that perhaps they really are.

What is true is that smaller churches have been closing or merging faster in the last few decades, and there are not as many under 100 in membership churches. But that intermediate size is still the normative experience, and bulk of religious practice and experience in this country.

Most people believe in God; surveys continue to show high numbers of people saying so, even post-COVID, as attendance has gone down sharply in many quarters. However, there are many church leaders and theologians who argue that what most people believe in is something called "moralistic therapeutic deism," which I'm not going to unpack again this week, but is basically God without all the heavy stuff or religious superstructure. Of those who are members, let alone attenders, you might think most people within churches are in general agreement on doctrinal matters, but ask any local church minister: not so much.

There are debates aplenty about how to define a "Biblical worldview" or consistent parameters for what it means to be an "Evangelical," but the reality is that even within a fairly well-defined religious tradition, you find a great deal of diversity within any given congregation. Assuming everyone believes the most well-known tenets of a particular church if they're within that tradition is going to trip you up in a hurry.

This has come out in recent back and forth in American life and within churches around abortion, following the dismantling of the Supreme Court precedents of the 1970s regarding a federal standard on abortion access. In brief, it's the question of whether you believe it's wildly inconsistent or not that a solid majority of Americans said before last month in surveys they believe the Roe protections should stand, but nearly the same percentage says they are comfortable with restrictions after around fifteen weeks. That's not quite consistent, but it fits what I hear in general from people in this area.

What do most people think? It's a hard question to really ask, and in a time when minority positions of all sorts seem to be hardening in place, you have lots of voices saying it doesn't even matter. And as Mom always said, just because everyone is doing it or saying it doesn't make it right: "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too?"

Our ability to create and maintain healthy communities, though, I would argue require us to get some clarity about where our current consensus actually is: around faith, around practice, regarding life and liberty in generally, let alone what happiness really is that we're supposed to be able to pursue.

We used to assume, many of us, that most people went to church — it's not clear that was ever true, and less so now — that most people believed the way we do about who God is and how to speak and listen in the divine presence, that most people planned to live a certain way, that most people had the same expectations of their government.

We also assumed everyone got the newspaper delivered to their house. As a paperboy in the 1970's, I can assure you it was never more than half. What other assumptions were we making, then or now?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he still tries to stay on the sidewalk after four years of walking a paper route. Tell him how you stay on the straight & narrow at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.