A career in journalism taught me, among many other things, that one always should be cautious about drawing conclusions from polls.
Some polls are, after all, done to prove a point. Others are done with bad methodology. And some are excellent pictures of reality at a certain point in time -- a point that is now gone, and along with it perhaps the accuracy of the picture.
Still, most of us find polls endlessly fascinating, especially in a presidential election year.
But the polling data I want to share with you today isn't about politics. It's about religion, and -- among other things -- how many Americans regularly attend worship services.
Churchleaders.com, a site that seeks to help Christian clergy and other leaders, reports that fewer than 20 percent of Americans regularly attend worship, and that's about half the traditionally reported number.
The 17.7 percent of Christians who regularly attended a worship service in 2004, as the story to which I've linked you reports, may or may not be accurate. I just don't know.
What I do know is this:
* That was eight years ago.
* The story is sloppily written, giving me cause to wonder about its conclusions. For instance, in the third paragraph, it talks about someone whose last name is Olson but never gives a first name. More than that, it talks about "Orthodox Christian" congregations, by which one would assume it means Eastern Orthodox (Greek, Armenian, Russian, etc.), given the capital O. But, no, later in the story we find that this really means lower-case-o orthodox, "Catholic, mainline and evangelical".
Those facts may not affect the picture the story paints of the polling or the accuracy of the findings. (And there are many more findings beyond worship attendance.) But in terms of methodology, I wonder whether the study took into account the many new worshipping communities that are rising under the wings of existing denominations -- communities not yet recognized as regular congregations but, nonetheless, places where people are gathering. Indeed, the Presbyterian Church (USA) has committed to creating 1,001 such worshipping communities within the next 10 years.
In any case, Christian congregations should be aware of these findings and remember that while Christians once considered the mission field to be foreign countries, today's mission field often lies right outside the doors of the church.
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FINDING WHAT GOD LOOKS LIKE
I love this story. It's about a Moroccan-born Muslim woman who, as a child, was frustrated that she couldn't see God. So eventually she became a physicist to understand the creation, and now is having great success unpacking information about quarks and such.
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