“For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” —Matthew 18:20
So reads the introduction to the report titled “This Place Means Everything to Me: Key Findings From a National Survey of Church Attenders in Post-Pandemic United States.”
Conducted over five years and involving 24,165 parishioners of more than 80 denominations, the study by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research offers a message of hope for clergy and congregants alike.
The report states that the majority of respondents said their religious faith and spirituality had strengthened since the pandemic. Religious donations, church involvement and community volunteering also increased.
“Religion is the first sense of community.” —L. Ron Hubbard
Of those surveyed, half were evangelical Protestant, one-third were Catholic or Orthodox and 18 percent were mainline Protestant.
The survey’s findings explore a variety of matters, but the most telling is the impact of the pandemic on congregations. A glance at the Change in Activity Participation graph reveals striking results. Twenty-five percent said they increased their participation in church music (choir, worship team, soloist, etc.) since the pandemic, far more than the 13 percent who said their participation had decreased, and in addition to the 56 percent whose participation remained the same. Twenty-seven percent upped their community service involvement, while 15 percent decreased and 58 percent stayed the same. The most dramatic change was religious education, wherein nearly a third (31 percent) said they had increased their study of their religion, with just 13 percent decreasing and 56 percent staying the same.
Another post-pandemic phenomenon is that 38 percent of respondents said they had started attending their current church within the last five years. And of those new attenders, 8 percent said they had never attended before and 22 percent said they hadn’t attended a congregation “for years.”
“This combined 31 percent of new attendees represent former religious ‘nones’ or congregational converts who are embracing organized religion for the very first time in their lives or returners who have been ‘re-churched’ after a lapse in participation,” the report reads.
Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote: “Religion is the first sense of community. Your sense of community occurs by reason of mutual experience with others. Where the religious sense of community and with it real trust and integrity can be destroyed then that society is like a sand castle unable to defend itself against the inexorable sea.”
In a time when so many people feel alone and unsure of whom to trust—pushed further apart by the media and other forces of division—the return to community, seen in the growing crowds at our churches, is not just good news for the churches.
It’s good news for all of us.
