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A national project aims to understand the impact of the pandemic on the church attendance, giving, staffing, and church leadership.
Most of us are aware of the effects of COVID on our home church. Many of us have heard accounts of various other churches through conversations with friends and colleagues. But it is hard to know what these individual stories mean for the church as a whole.
The National COVID-19 Church Attendance Project (NCCAP) represents our efforts to try to see the bigger picture. By gathering as many individual church stories as possible, from all over the country, we aim to provide a broad sense of the impact of COVID on the church and what the path to recovery has looked like so far. Through the collaboration of Wheaton College, Exponential, Outreach, and the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, our initial survey represents the experience of more than 600 churches, over 400,000 weekly worshippers geographically covering 47 states and the District of Colombia.
In our first article, we describe the nature of the project and its goals, and we gave an overview of our findings regarding church attendance patterns over the past year and a half. We reflected on the effects of COVID on church giving and staffing. Our final article of this three-part series will focus on church leadership and priorities at present and looking forward.
Initial Uncertainty. We all remember the beginnings of the pandemic. At the time, Christianity Today categorized viewpoints as polarized between, “The coronavirus is just another flu” and “We are on the brink of financial collapse”. Perhaps more impactful for church funding specifically was the tremendous uncertainty regarding how long the pandemic would last. It was common to plan events for “after the pandemic”—according to a study by Barna Group many pastors were planning ...
from Christianity Today Magazine
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