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The traditional definitions of "churched" and "unchurched" often don't tell a complete story about how Americans attend religious worship services, according to a recent Ellison Research study.
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40% of Americans are "Unchurched" (those who say they don't regularly attend services) who actually attend on occasion. |
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37% of Americans are "Churched" (those who say they are regular attenders) who don't attend at least weekly. |
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The study asked Americans to report on their attendance at worship services. Many studies on this topic have traditionally labeled worship attendance as a yes/no equation--people either attend on some type of regular basis (usually monthly or more) and are often called "churched," or they typically don't attend frequently enough to be considered "churched" and are considered simply "unchurched."
The Ellison Research study showed that only 63% of "churched" Americans actually report attending religious worship services once a week or more. The remaining 37% attend on a regular basis, but don't make it to worship services every week. They typically attend three times a month (12%), twice a month (16%), or once a month (9%).
For the second quarter of 2008, American mobile subscribers sent and received on average 357 text messages per month, compared with making and receiving 204 phone calls a month, according to a Nielsen Mobile survey.
In the first quarter of 2006, Americans sent and received 65 text messages per month. The surge in text messaging is being driven by teens 13 to 17 years old, who on average send and receive about 1,742 text messages a month. Even kids under the age of 12 are also heavy text users, averaging about 428 messages per month. |
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| People Still Moving, but Staying Close |
Between 2006 and 2007, 37.5 million people living in the United States moved to a different location. But they tended to move relatively short distances as shown in these figures:
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67% (25.2 million) stayed in the same county. |
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20% (7.4 million) moved to a different county within the same state. |
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13% (4.9 million) moved to a different state. |
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Churches need to be aware that many people are changing their locations without a change in employment. Even if the economy in a certain area is not generating mobility, there may be more people moving than expected.
Most mobility is housing related; people want to purchase a home or have more space. Making such a move, even if near by, can often become the opportunity to change churches, start attending church, or become less active.
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