Monday, April 23, 2007

Church attendance rates by age

(Part 7 in an 8 post series on Christian church attendance)
Okay, back to a series I started several weeks ago on church attendance. Here are some data about church attendance rates by age among those who define themselves as Christian. The first graph shows current attendance by age, and it turns out that older people, aged 50+, are more decided in their church going habits. They are both more likely to always go (i.e., weekly) or never go. Overall, the younger the Christian, the less frequently they attend church.


How has this changed over time? As shown in the graph below, weekly attendance rates have remained steady for people aged 50+, dropped for 30-49 year olds, and may be rising for younger people. If, in fact, these patterns hold for the population as a whole, I'm not sure how to explain them. Thoughts?

Data from the General Social Survey.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brad,

This is a very old post, but I am guessing you get notification of comments... did you ever do any follow up on this? It interests me.

Ed Stetzer

Brad Wright said...

Hello Ed,

No, I haven't done any follow-up on this. It's a reasonably popular topic in the journals, though, but I assume you've already seen those articles.

Cheers,

Brad