Will our children have faith?

Back after the crazy season.

If you're my age, you might remember that book from the early 80s by Christian education guru John Westerhoff III, Will Our Children Have Faith? I don't remember the book being all that useful, but the question has stuck with me. I guess what's brought it on is having just returned from a week long visit with my 14 month old grandson. His daddy is in seminary, studying for the ministry -- and I really wonder about the future of the church that they will be a part of.


A few other bits of grist for this mill. A while back, I read a short article by Nancy Ammerman in the Canadian version of Touchstone magazine, in which she wondered if Christians (especially the Protestant variety) have not pretty much given up on passing on their story to their children. The Sunday morning worship service with concurrent Sunday School is the norm and that's pretty much all the contact kids have with the church. Jews, Muslims, and other faith communities expect that children will be instructed in their religion outside the main gathering time of the week.

Robert Louis Wilken wrote in the last issue of First Things a perceptive comparison of Christianity and Islam. Islam has always understood itself to be a public religion in the sense that Islamic practice is lived out visibly. In the ideal of the Islamic state, religious practice becomes the cultural and legal norm. Christianity has evolved in a much different way, but, according to Wilken, it now finds itself at a disadvantage in terms of the future because in Europe and North America (excluding parts of the US) it has pretty much disappeared from the public square. Wilken has a particular Roman Catholic slant on things, but he's a wise guy, very learned, and I think he's got a point.

I alternate between days of optimism and days of discouragement and today I'm sliding towards the discouragement end of the scale. Faith is not just assent to a list of beliefs, but the deep imbibing of a narrative, a story, which becomes one's own story only after long exposure. The vast majority of Canadian children have been completely cut off from the Christian story to the point where even the traditional icons of Christmas have little or no meaning to them. And in our churches, we have capitulated to such an extent to aggressively proselytizing Sunday sports and other voracious activities, and have dumbed down our Christian education to accomodate teachers and parents who will make only the briefest commitment of time and effort, and we have abandoned age-old practices like family devotions -- so I really wonder what's going to become of the story in which faith has always taken root and grown.

Anybody out there want to try to cheer me up -- or just commiserate?

Counting Heads

One of my conclusions in my study "Untied Church" is that old ways of measuring church size and vitality aren't necessarily useful today. For example, counting "average weekly attendance" is a recipe for depression in many congregations because the numbers only head in one direction -- down. And that downward trend is cause for legitimate worry.

But our church has tracked attendance over three months -- May, October and February -- and found a surprising fact. In every one of those months, about 400 different individuals attended church at least once. And, the biggest month was February -- 429. Who'd a thunk it?

In the early 1980s, my church had a weekly average of about 400. Now, it's about 200. But I have a feeling that about the same number of people are coming, just not as often. I've commented on this before. And I really want to avoid glossing over the reality of the losses, but I also think that we have to start working with what we've got.

Is "Monthly" the new "Weekly"?

Our Worship planning team decided we would track the number of individuals who attended church over the course of a month. How did we do this? Easy. We passed a clipboard during the announcements and requested people simply to write their names and those of any family members who were actually physically present on that Sunday. We were motivated by a pretty well-informed hunch that part of the decline in Sunday attendance is that people are just coming to church less often than they used to.

In May, 387 people came to church at least once. In October, 399 people came to church, but this time, our hard-working secretary Rosemary broke these numbers down according to frequency. Here's what we found.

13.7% of that 399 people came to church all four Sundays.
20.6% came three Sundays.
25.2% came two Sundays.
And 41% came one Sunday.

In other words, of the basically 400 people who attended a service during October, two-thirds came once or twice.

I don't know about you, but I think a church with 400 people coming through the doors in a month is a pretty healthy church. Our challenge is to find ways to a) increase that 400 to, say, 500; and, more importantly, b) to change the once-a-monthers to more regular attenders.

And I know, I know, numbers aren't everything. But they aren't nothing either. One element of maintaining congregational health is to nurture regular worship attendance. We're working on how to do that. Comments and suggestions gratefully received.

This is Reg Bibby. Reg is a sociology professor at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. He's spent the last 30 years studying the attitudes of Canadians about all kinds of different things. What he's really focused on is religion.

Nobody knows more about religious trends in Canada than Reg Bibby.

In his latest books, Restless Gods and Restless Churches, Reg has come up with some startling conclusions. Everybody thinks that people are ditching traditional churches and turning to other spiritualities or to atheism. But, Reg says, that's not true. In fact, 85% of Canadians still identify with a traditional religious grouping.

Even though they don't attend church like they used to, they still affiliate in huge numbers with the churches they went to as children or that their parents still attend.

From the inside, these people look "inactive." Like they've dropped out. Like they don't care. But according to Reg Bibby, that's a BIG mistake for churches to make. Because many of these people still think they belong. They will turn to the church that they know when they need something -- a wedding or a baptism, crisis counselling, programs for their kids, or a way of making sense out of life.

And, here's the most important thing: between 40 and 75% of them are open to becoming more involved if they consider it worthwhile for themselves or their families.

The BIG question for the churches is: What are they going to do about this? How can churches touch the lives of the people Bibby calls "affiliates" in such a way that they establish (or re-establish) a connection?

What do you think? Is Bibby right? Or is he wrong? That's what I'm interested in finding out.