The Church Answers Podcast
Do Conservative Christians REALLY Attend Church More Frequently?
- Welcome to the Church Answers Podcast, presented by Chanian Associates. Chanian Associates are the accounting firm for the church. Now get ready for fast space insights on key issues affecting the local church today. We release three episodes each week, so make sure you've seen or heard them all. And now, here's the CEO of Church Answers, Tom Rayner. - Welcome to the Church Answers Podcast. I'm Tom Rayner, I'm joined by Jess Rayner. Jess Rayner has had surgery since the last time we recorded. I didn't know if I would say you sitting in that chair like you are, how's your knee? - Well, I'm not standing, that's for sure. Knee's good, I'm on the road to recovery, looking forward to getting back to walking fully again. But I'll get there, slow and steady. - That's a pretty serious surgery, a lot more serious than I think any of us thought it would be. - It's amazing what doctors can do, it really is. - The moral of the story is don't run. Well, all of my boys have been hurt running every one of them. - Let me encourage you not to start a health podcast. - No, no one's going to accuse me of starting a health podcast, Jess. All right, we want to talk today about conservative churches and particularly the Christians who are also conservative. Do conservatives attend church more frequently? That's the question we're going to ask. Before we get into that, we want to thank our sponsor, Chaney and Associates. They are the accounting firm for the church. And hey, by the way, they are the sponsor for the inaugural church answer to research project that has just been released. And we thank Chaney and Associates for providing the funding for that project. And it is really, really good. Hey, you got any type of bookkeeping, any type of finances you won't done. Call our folks at Chaney and Associates. You can see the link and the show notes. You can just go to chaneyassociates.com. All right, Jess, I'm going to show my age and not by just looking at the camera, but just by telling the audience a few things as you listen along. In 1970, I don't remember this because I was only 15 at the time, but I certainly studied about it later. In 1970, a man by the name of Dean Kelly wrote a seminal book called Why Conservative Churches Grown. Now, what was particularly remarkable about this is that Kelly was an executive at the National Council of Churches, which is a mainline left-leaning, more liberal organization. Yet he writes his book out of facts. And he says, look, we can say we don't like it. We can say that the facts are not our friends, but the reality of it is that data shows it. Conservative churches are growing. As time went on, things began to change. Kelly did a revision of that. I believe it was 1980, but don't hold me to that. So you fact check me and it could be wrong, but 1980, he did a revision to it, but nothing really changed. But then by the time we got, or around the turn of the century, something was happening. The largest conservative denomination in the world, or in the United States, was the Southern, yes, still, the Southern Baptist Convention, conservative. But it has the steepest decline of any of the evangelical denominations, and it is a very steep decline. So we're gonna try to mail some of those things together, Jess, and talk about it. But just off the top, whatever comment you want to have, what did it you see that makes that thesis really a viable thesis? Conservative Christians really attend church more frequently. - Yeah, I feel like there is a hunger for truth in the American culture right now. That, I mean, you think about with the information technology, you think about social media, you think about the internet, I mean, just talk about when that book was written in that 1970 book, The Revision 1980, what has happened since then is just this rise of information, and it has created this concept of like what is truth and obviously our culture is pushing individual truth, individual subjectivism, that whole concept. And I think a lot of people are starting to go, I know myself, and this is what I tell my church people, like I know myself, I would never want to follow my truth. I know myself well enough to go, I am not the one that I would want to follow. And so I think there's a hunger for truth, and people are going back to, well, what is truth? Where does it come from? Where does the existence of morality, why does it exist? And I think all that is pointing people back to God's word, and those churches whom preach God's word very faithfully are seeing more and more people come, because they want to hear it. - Very well said, we also have a database for this. One of our team members, by the name of Ryan Burge, has, well, to say he's done a study, he's like to say he's breathed it today. I mean, he does almost a study today, and you can look him up at graphsaboutreligion.com, he's remarkable social scientist, remarkable researcher. But what Ryan does, not Brian, what Ryan does is he looks at existing data, and then goes and assimilates it, and tells a story about the existing data, sometimes combining different data points and different data industry points. What he recently did, he got the cooperative election study, and that's just a simple way of saying that there's these organizations collecting a ton of data, and they're asking a ton of questions, including religious and church questions, but here's the key, here's why he gets so excited, as he would say he nerds out on it. He looks at the Lanja to know data, which means the same people are surveyed in multiple years. And so you can see the change among the same group of people. If you're doing a political poll, and one politician is at 52% one week, and the other one's at 48, and then it flip-flops the next week, the sale of the polls are wrong. No, sometimes it's just the people you poll. Well, this is the same people, it didn't change. And what has happened in this, just is that he looked at the Lanja to know data, and he was able to do a lot of inferences and direct information about attendance patterns. It was only two years, it was from 2020 to 2022, but what was remarkable about this, this is the coming out of the pandemic years. 2020, I don't even remember what percentage of the attendance, our church, mine and your church, was in 2020 compared to where it was in 2019. When you came out of the pandemic, do you remember the percentage about where you were? - 60% roughly. - That sounds close enough for me, and then eventually it began edging up, and now you're past, you've recovered and the church is doing well. Well, he looked at that data from 2020 to 2022, just those years, and basically asked the question, who is going to church, how frequently are they going to church, and who can we count on to see who is at church? And he found out it was primarily evangelicals who were going to church the most frequently. Evangelicals defined as, and he would say this in his study, conservative Christians. So conservative Christians were returning to church at a greater and more brisk rate than others. Again, this is hypothesis, but think just, is your answer going to be the same if I say, why did the conservative Christians return and the others did not? - Right, yeah, I mean, I think there's some correlation there, causation, however you want to look at it. I think there's definitely the fact that it goes, I think it does go back to that hunger for truth, for God's word, and so for people who don't have that hunger, they were less likely to return, just because it wasn't something they desired. So yeah, and I think too, I think even across the board, when you take 2020, I'm not getting into some politics here, but there's even been some recent new stories that come out that basically said, you know, some information was suppressed, some information wasn't released. There's just different things that happened during 2020 that's coming to light, and that has caused people to go, man, I really believed everything I was told, and factually now we know that again, there's some information that wasn't released, some information that was modified. And so now people think even now we're going, I really want to know what's true. Like I have to know for myself, I have to figure this out, I can't rely on other people, and I think so, see people are going to conserve the churches to go, I want to hear what God's word has to say, and those churches that are faithfully preaching God's word, that's why I think people are turning, and conservatives as well. I think that, so I do, I put all that together, I think it makes sense. - Well, something else is almost a side path on this. The attendance at the virtual campus streaming, however you count it, those are the weirdest things, oh, they were there three seconds, we're gonna count three people. All of those metrics, no matter how you count it, is down dramatically. I mean, any way that you count it, the whole idea, the whole idea is just completely down. Any thoughts on that part before we wrap this thing up, why is in person so popular compared to the digital, 'cause digital is going to be the wave of the future. - Right, right. At the end of the day, in how we're created as beings, we're designed to be with people. And I know you as an introvert have a hard time believing that at times, but we are designed to be with people. That is God's design, and I think at the end of the day, people always gonna want to come together. God designed it, God designed for all of us just to walk together in life together. So, yeah, I think that is on top of the search for hunger, there's the search for community. Well, as we wrap the subject, we'll just simply say this, conservatives are returning to church more frequently at a greater pace than others of other theological persuasions and maybe even political persuasions. And when it's all said and done, those are the facts. And I just commend everybody to go to Ryan Burgess, graphs about religion. Great resource, we've got it in the show notes. The particular article I'm talking about is, why were people attending church more or less in 2022 versus 2020? Great research stuff. I just wanted to bring up that one point. The whole Dean Kelly thesis that is now 55 years old is still true, conservatives attend more frequently. Well, that's it for the church answers podcast with Tom Rayner and Jess Rayner. We've got a lot more to share with you. We're gonna be sharing with you a lot of different things. We're gonna be, we're gonna be talking about the one thing that church members can do that will predict for you that they're going to be the most committed in your church. It's not what you think, I promise, it's not, but you can listen to that. That's going to be the next episode, episode number 230. It's already ready for you. So if you wanna go take a break and come listen to it, you can, if you wanna go to sleep and wake up tomorrow and listen to it, you can as well. Thank you as always to Chaney and Associates, our friends in California who are the accounting firm for the church all over the world. We appreciate them. Thank you listeners. Thank you YouTubers who are watching this, give us a thumbs up and give us a review. Just subscribe to us if you can. And then those on the podcasting out, thank you for listening to this as well. We'll see you in the next episode of the church answers podcast. - You have been listening to the church answers podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. Chaney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. You need to focus on ministry. Chaney will focus on finances. Also, please subscribe and give a review to the church answers podcast on YouTube and on your favorite podcasting app. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)