Are these churches pretty typical?

[BabyLutheran]

I stumbled on a way to look up statistics on ELCA churches nearby.

The closest by
Baptized 452 Confirmed 351 Average Attendance 149

The one we have visited twice, but is further away, and I really like it. Not sure if it's because it is big that I like it.
Baptized 923 Confirmed 547 Average Attendance 446

The second closest
Baptized 664 Confirmed 444 Average Attendance 275

Is it pretty normal to have such a low percentage of attendance of baptized members?

Also, does bigger always mean better? The one that is only 2 miles away has avg attendance of 149 at 2 services. Is that a bad sign?

The one we visited has had a fairly dramatic increase in attendance: 223 in 2002 up to 446 in 2006.

The other two are trending down. Just curious about it, that's all.

[stumpjumper]

I think that's about normal.

Unless I'm out of town, I usually try to make it to Church every Sunday and sometimes mid-week but, even then, I probably only make it to Church on 3 out of 4 Sundays and I would say my family is probably above average in attendance.

My wife works every other Sunday so she's well below 50% though she does attend services at her place of work (a Nursing home).

[BabyLutheran]

Yeah, I figured it was probably typical. We would be that way as well, our daughter swims and one weekend a month we have a swim meet both days.

[BabyLutheran]

There are a few other churches a little further away. Just looks like 100-150 is the average attendance at most Lutheran churches here. Maybe there are too many churches and not enough Lutherans here in the Virginia Beach area. Seems kind of sad actually. Is this a crisis nationwide?

It seems like the key to higher attendance seems to be having a preschool on site.

I apologize if I am stepping on toes. I am curious, maybe all mainstream denominations are dipping. I am used to the nondenominational churches with big attendance numbers and little substance!

Maybe I just answered my own question...

[DaRev]

You need to realize that "attendance" is not necessarily an indication of people that are on the rolls but do not attend. For example, a family of four that attends every other week for whatever reason counts as an average of 2 "attendees". One person who comes once a month counts as 1/4 "attendee", etc.

[BabyLutheran]

Oh, okay it makes a little more sense.

Thanks, and it really doesn't matter what the attendance is if the Gospel is being proclaimed, I hope I didn't come across as wishing there were some gigantic Lutheran church around that I could join.

[Melethiel]

Average attendance at my church is ~130 people per week...attendance drops during the summer because of the high percentage of college students. I actually prefer having less people - that way you can get to know everyone. In bigger churches, I get the feeling that you're just another number.

[IowaLutheran]

Average attendance at my church is ~130 people per week...attendance drops during the summer because of the high percentage of college students. I actually prefer having less people - that way you can get to know everyone. In bigger churches, I get the feeling that you're just another number.

Agreed. On a high Sunday (excluding Christmas/Easter where we get 400) we'll get 200; otherwise, the average is about 150. I prefer that size to a larger size where people can be members for the same church for years and never see one another.

[Tofferer]

I sometimes think our best attendance is on Super Bowl sunday. I wonder why though.

[DaRev]

Folks praying for their team? ^_^

[Tofferer]

Folks praying for their team? ^_^
Yeah, the Seattle SeaHawks need all the prayer they can get. Outside of that, I'd be surprised if average attendance on a sunday ever got above 45 total people (including children and infants).

[RevCowboy]

I stumbled on a way to look up statistics on ELCA churches nearby.

The closest by
Baptized 452 Confirmed 351 Average Attendance 149

The one we have visited twice, but is further away, and I really like it. Not sure if it's because it is big that I like it.
Baptized 923 Confirmed 547 Average Attendance 446

The second closest
Baptized 664 Confirmed 444 Average Attendance 275

Is it pretty normal to have such a low percentage of attendance of baptized members?

Also, does bigger always mean better? The one that is only 2 miles away has avg attendance of 149 at 2 services. Is that a bad sign?

The one we visited has had a fairly dramatic increase in attendance: 223 in 2002 up to 446 in 2006.

The other two are trending down. Just curious about it, that's all.

I don't know about how the number shake out in the US, but here in Canada most Lutheran congregations are like those churches you posted above.

Our congregation has about 800 members and about 300 people on a Sunday. This interesting thing is that out of the 300 people that come every Sunday, 200 are totally different people each week. I think there are probably lots of people that come twice or once a month. People just seem to have different schedules these days.

Lutherans tend to have far more congregations in most area than most other denominations. Here in Calgary we have 30 ELCIC congregation and probably another 20 LCC congregations. In my hometown of Edmonton, roughly similar in size to Calgary, there are also about 30 congregations varying in size from 100 members to close to 1000. The Pentecostal Congregations have big mega churches with probably between 1000 and 4000 members. However, there are only 4 or 5 of them. And because of the prohibitive conditions put on baptism, they only have about 150 actual members each.

"Evangelical" mega church tend to get lots of press. The big one here in Calgary has a couple thousand people attending between all their weekend services. However, in Canada, there are 500 Catholics for every protestant. The Roman Catholic Church across the street from our congregation has six services every weekend with 1000 people at each and its never mentioned in the news. Another 150 member Lutheran congregation here shares a building with a Roman Catholic parish. The Roman Catholic congregation estimates that it serves between 15000 and 30000 catholics, most of whom are immigrants. I didn't know such a huge church existed in Calgary until the pastor of the Lutheran church told me about it.

In Canada, like in the US, the big evangelical megachurches get all the press, but all the evangelicals in Canada make up the 5th biggest denomination in Canada behind Roman Catholics, United Church (Presbyterian/Methodist merger), Anglicans and Lutherans.

And in Canada, Christianity has been in decline between the 70s and 90s. The biggest reason for this is not really any big change in numbers, but that people who practice no religion had the option to put nothing on their census information in the 90s. But in the 70s,s they had to put down that they were something even if they hadn't been in a church for years. However, since mid-90's number have begun to recover in Canada, and I suspect its a similar story in the US.

I hope that gives some insight into your question.

[Lupinus]

My church actually isn't to bad. At last count I think we have 179 baptised members and 149 confirmed, and last service we had 95 at worship. We tend to average 85 per service, and that tends to be about 50-60 members who are a there every Sunday core group. We also have a high communion percentage. Last week there were 63 who took communion, high percentage for our area as I understand it.

I agree with the liking of a small church. Seems more like a family :)

[maylor]

Stats for my church (WELS) 2007

Membership: Baptized 183

Communicant/Confirmed 157

Average attendance 120


We're in the Southwest, and I think most the WELS churches in these parts are small. Half of our members are from Wisconsin!

[CaliforniaJosiah]

I think my pastor mentioned that the average church attendence of LCMS churches in California runs about 120 or so. That's about the size of my church. My dad's church (not Lutheran) is about that size now too - it has been declining for several years and the average age has been going way up (it's look pretty gray in the place these days).


The relationship between ave. worship attendence and the official membership is solely a function of how much a phantom their membership list is. It's not unusual for congregations to "count" everyone who has ever pasted by the church (they may be dead now, for all the church knows....)



.

[DaRev]

The relationship between ave. worship attendence and the official membership is solely a function of how much a phantom their membership list is. It's not unusual for congregations to "count" everyone who has ever pasted by the church (they may be dead now, for all the church knows....)

This is unfortunately true in many places. My home church has people on the rolls who haven't darkened the church doorway in nearly 20 years.
Here, the elders and I regularly address the issue of inactive members and will occasionally remove names due to self-exclusion.

[Tofferer]

This is unfortunately true in many places. My home church has people on the rolls who haven't darkened the church doorway in nearly 20 years.
Here, the elders and I regularly address the issue of inactive members and will occasionally remove names due to self-exclusion.
I am on the board of elders at our church and we have had to do the same thing from time to time. It is a sad thing when we have to do this. It generally takes an hour just to remove one member.

[TCat]

My LCMS church has about 2500 members and we average 1250 to 1500 for the 5 services on the weekends.
It's kind of a large church and continually growing. I prefer a larger church myself. I grew up in little churches with everyone knowing to much about each other.

[latebloomer]

My LCMS church has about 800 baptised on the books, not sure how many confirmed. But we have 2 congregations, in a way. The 8:00 people and the 10:30 people often don't know they belong to the same congregation, unless they have kids in Sunday School together.

[DaRev]

There are pros and cons concerning the larger "mega" congregations. They usually have a lot to offer in terms of various ministries; youth, young adult, singles, couples, senior, etc. And there's usually no shortage of volunteers for such activities. The problem is that people in the church don't ever get to know each other on an personal level as they do in smaller churches. That, and the huge backdoor losses that they experience is a major downside. You may see a lot of new people coming in, but many of them don't stay any length of time, so the numbers don't seem to grow all that much. As it was once described to me, their ministries are a mile wide but only a few inches deep.

[RevCowboy]

There are pros and cons concerning the larger "mega" congregations. They usually have a lot to offer in terms of various ministries; youth, young adult, singles, couples, senior, etc. And there's usually no shortage of volunteers for such activities. The problem is that people in the church don't ever get to know each other on an personal level as they do in smaller churches. That, and the huge backdoor losses that they experience is a major downside. You may see a lot of new people coming in, but many of them don't stay any length of time, so the numbers don't seem to grow all that much. As it was once described to me, their ministries are a mile wide but only a few inches deep.

In many ways you have to find your own sub congregation within the congregation that is usually one of the various ministries that they offer. My problem with that is everyone is segregated according to age or life situation.

[TCat]

It's true that in larger churches you do have kind of sub-groups within the larger one but even that can have advantages.

Personally I am involved in 2 ministries within my church and so I am generally involved with people in those ministries right now. I have been in other ministries at various times and have gotten to know others in those ministries as well.

Imo one of the nicer things about larger churches generally are that there are many different ministries offering many more places to serve and often greater chances to lead and grow.

We are having a ministry fair in a few weeks, a friend of mine is heading it up and is a bit panicked at the idea of having to organize something like 60+ ministries on our large patio for several Sundays. LOL, I warned her about looking available!!!

[DaRev]

Imo one of the nicer things about larger churches generally are that there are many different ministries offering many more places to serve and often greater chances to lead and grow.

This is true. I was at one of our larger congregations the past couple days and they have a lot of exciting ministry activities going on there.