Survey: Alternative Forms of 'The Church' are Changing the Religious Landscape
The unchurched are less a cause for concern as many might be participants in house churches, marketplace ministries, or cyber churches.
For a growing number of Americans, especially Boomers, the local church is no longer the place to go for worship, according to research by the group whose published polls are most quoted within Evangelical circles.
New forms of doing “Church,” such as house churches, marketplace ministries, and cyber churches have now drawn 50 million Americans, bringing them closer to God, but farther from a local church, reports The Barna Group.
For most of the past century, the local congregational church attracted the worshippers. The United States has more than 300,000 Protestant congregations and some 20,000 Catholic parishes that have been the primary gathering place for Americans.
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Now, 50 million Americans have revealed their participation in new forms – which, in the last 2-3 years, has seen “significant growth,” Barna indicated.
The results are based on telephone interviews with a nationwide random sample of 1,002 adults conducted in July 2005; another survey of 1,008 adults conducted in May of 2005; and 1,003 adults in January 2005.
According to George Barna’s new book, Revolution released in September, it was a desire to know God that led these “Revolutionaries” – a term that the book uses – to seek for alternate methods of faith expression and experience.
In a typical week, nine percent of all adults participate in a house church; twenty percent engage in marketplace ministries – a group of people at their place of work, school, or play; and one out of every ten adults use the Internet as their primary method of faith interactivity – although most of them use it in tandem with another form.
"It is not uncommon to find people who attend an alternative church gathering regularly but maintain some loose connection with a congregational church," Barna said. "Often, that connection is retained to satisfy the expectations of a family member. In their minds, though, it is the alternative church that emerges as their dominant form of church."
The California-based researcher stated that the magnitude of this movement will reshape the religious world within the next two decades.
