Being in the church sound and acoustics business for over 33 years, you get around enough to see firsthand if the church community is growing or shrinking. After all, when all of your income comes from providing a service exclusive to the church community, you would want to know if your services will become obsolete or not.
The question stands, is the church community growing or shrinking? The short answer is – – – – the church community is growing and church attendance is growing. Churches for the last 100 years have been growing on average about 10 to 14% every year. That is the good news. Unfortunately, that 10% growth annually is not the same as 10% of the population.
It seems that sometime around the mid 1970s the population started to grow in North America (and the rest of the world for that matter,) at a fast rate than what the church was growing. In order for the church to grow at the same rate as the rest of the world, the church would have had to grow up to 25% annually. So while the number of Christians in relationship to the total population is declining, the church continues to keep growing.
What also makes it harder to keep track of church growth is the number of breakaway churches that leave the umbrella of the denominations where church growth is not often recorded to any national data base. In my work, I get to see both denominational churches and independent churches. At the end of the day, it seems that there isn’t much differences between them.
Many people who were part of denominational churches often leave to get away from the institutional, the bureaucracy, the rules, the regulations and static growth burdened by years of complacency. The problems I am hearing from people who have been going to these larger “growing independent churches” is that after a while, they complain about the same institutional, bureaucracy, rules, regulations and push for more growth burdened by years of complacency. The difference is that they are inside the same bureaucracy that they left years ago and often don’t realize that they are now the cause of why people are leaving the independent churches are starting unsupported breakaway churches. Who is keeping track of those numbers?
Then there are the non-registered home churches that are out there. There are thousands of them that average about 12 people each. Who knows how many of these groups are there but, at the end of the day, overall statistics pegs church growth at 10 to 14%. That is good news. Will the “church” ever be more that 10% of the population again? Most likely not.
By Joseph De Buglio
Welcome to the world of Church Acoustics & Sound Systems 