by Jeremy Halcrow
Ministry strategies that address below-average levels of church attendance among people in their 30s are likely to enhance achievement of the Diocesan Mission.
This finding emerges from new Anglicare research into church attendance patterns across the Sydney Diocese.
Last year, Archbishop Jensen expressed his concern in Southern Cross that there is an emerging group of ‘well-instructed and keen Christians’ who come irregularly to church. The fear is that this group may undermine the goal of seeing 10 per cent of Sydney in Bible-believing churches within 10 years.
Data released by the National Church Life Survey (NCLS) shows that this phenomenon is more often found among attenders in the 30-something age bracket than other age groups. John Bellamy, Anglicare’s NCLS researcher, said that around 83 per cent of people surveyed in Sydney Anglican churches usually attend church every week.
The data shows a dip in the frequency of attendance among Sydney Anglican church-goers aged between 30 and 39. While over 86 per cent of young people in their teens and twenties attend every week, this figure drops to 77 per cent amongst 30-somethings only to rise well past 80 per cent for middle-aged people and back past 85 per cent for seniors.
Dr Bellamy said the fact that many people in their thirties have young children offered a partial explanation for this phenomenon. “We tested the data to see if child-rearing offered an explanation. It certainly seems to explain part, but not all, of the story,” he said.
Although it cannot be proved from the data, Dr Bellamy suspects that the increasing busyness of today’s young parents is another factor that is impacting their attendance at church. “There are many more young families where both parents are working. The focus on work and career would be expected to have an impact on the time they have available on Sundays,” he said.
However, Dr Bellamy said that Sydney Anglican churches could also take heart from the data. “The high frequency of attendance reported by teenagers and young adults suggests that study, weekend work and leisure activities are not diminishing commitment to church activities among attenders in this age group to the same extent,” Dr Bellamy said. “Indeed, it may be that youth church services are playing a counter-cultural role in helping them to resist these pressures.”
The research showed that the percentage of Sydney Anglicans regularly attending church had been static throughout the 1990s. This was despite the dramatic shift to Sunday trading and ‘work casualisation’ that occurred in the 1990s that has increased demands for people to work on Sundays.
Another key finding of the research is that the fringe of occasional attenders – those who attend monthly or less often – declined from 8.4 per cent in 1991 to 6.6 per cent in 2001. In contrast, the number of highly committed people who attend more than one church service on a Sunday is increasing.
“It appears that there is an increasing level of commitment among some Sydney Anglicans,” Dr Bellamy said. “At the same time we may be losing the fringe of loosely committed church-goers from church life all together.”
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