Average churches filled with non-average churchgoers

Great post on church membership statistics and how to interpret them, by Michael Bell guest-posting at Internet Monk.

It turns out that the average church is small (either about 75 people or 185 people, depending on how you count), but that the average churchgoer attends a large church.

How can this be? Well, that’s what happens when about half the churchgoers in the US are found in less than 10% of the churches.

Bell explains it very clearly and well – the post is a great demonstration of how to write clearly about a difficult topic like statistics.

As Bell points out, these facts have huge implications for denominations and for pastors. He poses the example of a denomination in which half the members attend a single church (not so unlikely), and asks:

“If half your denomination goes to one church, what do you do when it comes to denominational decision making? One church, one vote? You are then saying that half your people don’t really have any say. One person, one vote, or one pastor, one vote? Then one church wields an inordinate amount of influence within the denomination. And what happens if that one church doesn’t like the direction that the denomination is headed? If it leaves, you lose half of your denomination, half your support for your national office, half of your support for your missionaries, half your support for your educational institutions.”

How does this affect seminaries and pastors?

“. . . if these students [seminarians] come from churches in the same proportions as church attenders, then 50% of seminary students come from roughly 8% to 9% of the churches. Their life experience in church is with larger churches. If they are initially placed as an associate, they will be building on their experience in other large churches. Yet, 90 percent of senior pastoral positions are in churches less than 350 people, and 50 percent of senior pastoral positions are in churches less than 75 people.”

Very, very interesting stuff.

So during my year of visiting churches I was usually seeing average churches filled with non-average church members. Or non-average churches filled with average church members.