This explains why there are more Baptists in South Carolina than people.

I've experienced this in SoCal as well. Many of the (what I would call struggling) Lutheran churches are showing membership and congregation counts in the 1k to 1500 range, when, in actuality, there are only 200-400 bodies in the seats on Sundays. This is a marketing blog and not a doctrinal or theology-in-practice blog, but I would speculate that some of the more conservative and traditional/liturgical congregations are struggling to compete with the commercialized and heavily marketed mega-churches that speak a language of inclusion in their marketing pieces. Speculative statistics say that the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod will be all but gone in the next couple of decades if some changes are not made. Perhaps those changes involve keeping "placeholders" on the rosters for those who've passed on. Part of the danger of traditional thinking is "this church has been here for over a hundred years and we've never needed commercials before. Why now?"

That's interesting (and understandable as I grew up as an SBC PK) - we (westside family church - the church i work at) are SBC but we only have about 1600 members and close to 4000 that show up on sunday.

I think Corey's attributing part of smaller churches feeling the pressure to "compete with the commericalized and heavily marketed mega-churches" needs reconsideration. Churches for decades have been more focused on membership than attendance - well before there was such a name or category as Mega Church.

Go check out the minutes from the Southern Baptist General Convention from 20-30 years ago and read how for decades Pastors were introduced as pastors of XXXX member churches.

I think the real issue could be that back when there was a viable count of both worship attendance and Sunday School, the total numbers were simply added togther. This was also before church database software was plentiful, so it was just easier to say "we have an XXXX member church" based on these numbers.

In today's world, where accurate counts are easy to tabulate and track, churches still (for the most part) want to tell you about how big their "membership" is. The only other group of people who I know are more interested in membership over attendance are fitness clubs, where up to 50% of their "members" don't show up - and they count on that both for income and to ensure they have enough machines/space for everyone!

I find this interesting, because attendees are those who show up. The 20% of the 80% who do the financial giving in most churches are attendees. The group of volunteers is mainly (if not nearly completely) comprised of atendees.

So why do we still count membership over attendance? For some, it's simply a trained behavior of "we've always done it that way". For others, it's an ego-protection device to justify their position in a stagnant or declining church attendance. I suspect that it's mostly because the vast majority of churches are still using outdated databases and are too lazy to take the time to not only count attendance, but - more importantly - use that data to ensure inreach and outreach are being done by the staff and lay leadership.

My 2 cents,

Roll call is the so friggen silly. When it was about care and concern for those that "didn't make Sunday... maybe, maybe that was cool. Or when people were loyal to the denomination or church. Now-- forget about it... those days are long gone. I have seen with my own eyes how silly the counting thing has gotten. It's not about care-- its about ego and just plain guilt. "Oh you weren't in church for the past 5 years." No kidding... it took that long to get your EE people out here. Where is the Senior guy...? I want a visit from him. Roll call, give me a break.
Don

One of the biggest reasons that church attendence is so low is the fact that the church is not relational. We have a system that is designed to generate funds to keep itself alive rather than build peoples lives. The church tries to make programs to please people instead of pleaseing God.
People are looking for a cause to believe in not entertainment. For the same reasons the church is not the life changing force it should be. We over market and over analize everything to try to build our market share and we lose touch with the people. for this very reason the church is plauged by sin amazingly the statistics for divorce are the same inside the church as in the world. Funny most in the system are more worried over the numbers than the condition of the people.

The comments are interesting but the truth may be a little more simplistic. The original article did not include much about how the figures were derived. Probably sick and shut-ins count for something, and probably people who are no longer attending count. Another large share may be people who simply weren't there on the Sunday morning that the survey was taken. Not everyone goes 4 Sundays out of the month - some may miss a Sunday out of the month. Summers are notorious for this as people are travelling on summer vacation. I would guess in many churches its not the same people attending every Sunday?