Nearly every American church has implemented significant changes in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The surveys mentioned below offer data about changes that have occurred and changes people would welcome in the future. Each statistic comes from a different survey.
- 3% of Americans planned to attend an Easter worship service in person (PRRI survey conducted April 6-11, 2020)
- 29% of churches have stopped offering communion for the time being (Barna survey conducted March 20 – April 6, 2020)
- 35% of Americans feel in-person church services and other religious gatherings should be opened as soon as possible (Scott Rasmussen survey conducted April 9-11, 2020)
- 52% of church leaders believed that the best way to describe how prepared their congregation is financially to survive the crisis is “it will be tight, but we will manage by reducing expenses without too much pain” (survey conducted through a collaboration of The Billy Graham Center’s Send Institute, Exponential, Leadership Network, Catalyst, Discipleship.org, and ARC during March 2020)
- 68% of congregations have simply moved their worship service online, trying to replicate their offline weekly gatherings as closely as possible. (Heidi A. Campbell, April 16, 2020)
So What?
Church is changing faster than ever before. If the surveys mentioned in this post were repeated on a monthly basis, I’d expect to see significantly different results over time.
When congregations engaged in their earliest efforts of fully online worship the default seemed to be experiences that were livestreamed or recorded in the congregation’s primary sacred space and largely replicated the normal Sunday morning experience. Over time, I’ve been encouraged to see many of these transform into something quite different. In a similar way, more congregations have begun celebrating communion both as a result of the length of the closures to in person gatherings as well as to guidance from denominations and/or learning from other congregations who pioneered such offerings.
It is my hope that the speed of innovation within houses of worship will not plateau any time soon.
Additional posts in this series include
- Easter Miracles: Empty Tomb, Empty Churches (April 12, 2020)
- Life in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic (March 29, 2020)
- Ministry in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic (March 22, 2020)
- Worship In the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic (March 15, 2020)