Nearly half of churchgoers in the United States haven’t watched an online service in the last four weeks, and among those who have, only 40% say they’ve been watching services from their regular home church, according to polling data.
48% of churchgoers reported that they had not watched any church online in the last four weeks. Less than half of the remaining 52% who did watch church online said they watched the service of their own church, with 23% reporting that they streamed a different church online.
While some church leaders have been clamouring for churches to be allowed to reopen their buildings to restart Sunday services, research shows that not everyone plans on rushing back to the pews.
Only 21.5% of pastors said a low community level of coronavirus cases would be a good time for them to reopen for services again. Some 17% said only when social distancing and stay-at-home guidelines are lifted, while 14% said when local businesses are open. Another 8% noted that the opening of local restaurant seating would be a good sign to reopen. Smaller percentages of pastors said they first wanted to see either widely available testing, the reopening of schools, or a vaccine before they would hold in-person services.
Some 15% required all of those conditions to be met, while some 10% said they just weren’t sure when they would reopen.
A blogger, Carey Nieuwhof, a former lawyer and founding pastor of Connexus Church in Ontario, Canada noted that maybe ‘a lot of leaders are struggling with the lack of “normal” more deeply than they realise. Get counselling, talk to a friend, pray and prepare yourself for a longer period of disruption than you want. That’s what leadership requires sometimes’.
Shift online?
Nieuwhof believes that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic could be a blessing as it has fast-tracked a digital shift in the church world. He predicts that ‘growing churches in the future will become digital organisations with physical expressions, not physical organisations with a digital presence.’
‘I realise there will be many who push back against this, but it’s foolish to ignore the fact that people connect more easily online and often admit the truth more readily online than they do in-person,’ he wrote. ‘To put digital church back on the shelf in the new normal is to ignore the greatest opportunity the church today has to reach people.’
