DAVID ADAMS speaks with Dr Ruth Powell about the ground-breaking National Church Life Survey kicking off again late next year…
From Catholic to Pentecostal, the Salvation Army to the Church of the Nazarene, churches of all sizes and shapes from across Australia are being invited to take part in the sixth National Church Life Survey in October and November next year.
The largest and longest-running longitudinal survey of local church life in the world, the survey’s origins go back to a small research project in 1991 which was looking at who attended church. Now run by an internationally recognised research organisation, it which aims to provide a snapshot of the role of the Christian faith in individual lives as well as the place of local churches in their communities and, more broadly, denominational trends.
|
|
PICTURE: NCLS Research 10 FINDINGS FROM THE 2011 NATIONAL CHURCH LIFE SURVEY These 10 facts are extracted from the results of the 2011 National Church Life Survey which involved around 260,000 worship attenders in 3,100 churches across around 20 denominations in Australia. While these 10 facts relate to the national scene, more targeted profiles of results for local churches and regions offer a more comprehensive insight into the levels of vitality, the experiences of spirituality and the signs of hope for church life. • In 2011 women accounted for 60 per cent of all attenders aged 15 years and more than 22 per cent of attenders were born in non-English speaking countries.
• Thirty-three per cent of church attenders participated in regular small group prayer or Bible study groups and 44 per cent had a leadership or ministry role in their church. • In the previous 12 months before the survey 86 per cent said they have grown in their faith and 35 per cent had invited someone to come to church. • The most supported feature of church life was the value placed on innovation with 67 per cent of attenders recording their appreciation for this feature. • When attenders described what they always experience during their church’s worship service the strongest response was “a sense of God’s presence” (42 per cent) followed by “growth in understanding of God” (32 per cent). • Most attenders reported a strong sense of belonging to their local church – 48 per cent say it is growing and a further 27 per cent said that it is stable. • Fifty-two per cent of attenders reported being at ease with sharing their faith and another 17 per cent said they look for opportunities to do so. • When asked what aspects of church need to receive attention in the next 12 months, 32 per cent indicated building a strong sense of community within the congregation and 29 per cent wanted to encourage people to discover/use their gifts . • The top strengths of leaders were listening deeply to others (60 per cent) and learning & growing from experiences (54 per cent). • The average age of church attenders rose from 52 years in 2001 to 55 years in 2011 continuing the long-term ageing trend. Source: First Impressions Results from the 2011 National Church Life Survey. NCLS Research, Sydney, 2012.
|
Dr Ruth Powell, director of NCLS Research – the organisation which conducts the survey, says that the researchers had no idea the study would develop into the size it is today.
“Each time that we have gone back to the churches – every five years, at the same time as the (Australian Government) Census – they have said we need to do this again,” she says. “It’s a credit to the churches that they wanted to continue this partnership and I think they have engaged with the fact that in times of change having research, having evidence, is really important…(T)he landscape keeps changing and you need to have good information.”
Under the survey process, every member of a congregation is asked to answer a range of questions (there’s special survey forms leaders and for children) with results then presented to each church a few months later. Churches pay a base fee to take part along with a small additional cost per survey form filled out (the forms currently come in eight different languages).
Around 3,100 local congregations took part in the last survey in 2011, representing about a quarter of all congregations in Australia and ranging from churches with less than 10 people through to mega-churches like Hillsong. While more than 20 denominations have taken place in the survey in Australia, it is hoped that 2016 may see Orthodox churches participating for the first time.
Following the success of the Australian project, surveys have since been conducted in a range of other countries – including the US, UK and New Zealand – based on the Australian model. A pilot has also been conducted in The Netherlands and NCLS has just finished a pilot project in South Africa which involved 140 churches.
Dr Powell says there are numerous reasons why churches take part in the survey including the fact that it’s a cost-effective way for local churches to reflect on their health and vitality.
“What’s unique about this project is that it resources the local church and says we will give you a mirror for you to see how you are going in terms of church vitality – not just numbers but the vitality of your church, the health of your church – and we want you to start a conversation about how you can grow the vitality of your local church.”
She says the survey also provides denominational and regional leaders with an overall picture of their member churches including location and size and what’s happening within them.
“(T)he local church knows it’s running a soup kitchen or a mothers and babies group or something but at a denominational level they don’t know, and so we’re resourcing leaders who have to make strategic decisions or pastoral decisions by giving them an overview of their churches.”
Dr Powell says the survey can also provide churches with a “reliable, solid research base” which speaks to wider community about the valuable work the church is doing.
“It’s a little bit of a standing up and being counted. So some churches do it…because they want to make sure that they have been counted in this national snapshot of the church in Australia.”
Noting that each of the surveys in the past has come with its own “tone”, Dr Powell says she thinks the 2016 survey will show that while the church has been “battered about” as it has faced sometimes justified criticism from wider society, the church is starting to respond by pointing to some of the good things it contributes the greater good.
“It’s like, ‘We just want to stand up and be counted’ or (have) acknowledged that there’s this incredible gift to the Australian society through what local churches do,” she says. “That seems to be the tone – it’s like ‘Hang on, we’re not just going to crawl away, we’re going to stand up…(W)e’re still here and we do have some good things to offer our communities.’”
This can include not only the hope and purpose churches offer to the hundreds of thousands who attend every week across Australia but also the community-building that goes on as a result, not to mention the enormous amount of volunteer work carried out by church attenders every week in areas such as welfare and justice.
Among the key trends Dr Powell has seen over the past five surveys have been changes in the size of churches with declines in the numbers attending some of the biggest mainstream churches such as the Catholic and Anglican churches and increases in other church denominations such as those belonging to the Pentecostal movement.
There’s also been a “big increase” in the bridges churches are building with the wider community. “Across every movement we see congregations offering more, doing more, than they used to,” Dr Powell says.
“Now, partly that might be a response to the fact that we’re losing connection with our communities and so we’re offering more things or we’re getting busy but it could also be, just, ‘Look, we’re got to be a missional church now…Mission has come home and we need to start intentionally building bridges and those bridges look like many different things’. We’ve seen that in the figures and we see this much more service, action, welfare, care – I’ll summarise it as being the hands and feet of Christ…”
Dr Powell this could partly be a reflection of the realisation that the church can no longer take its position in society for granted. “I think that’s part of it and I think that, at that local level, people (are)…understanding that you’ve got to engage the local context and you’ve got to be relevant…That’s been happening everywhere.”
In contrast, there has been a drop in the number of people inviting others to church. “They’re willing to talk about their faith – that continues, they’re willing to share faith but when it comes to inviting, it’s like we’re moving more to the doing stuff rather than talking about it…The linking of word and deed, I think, is where our challenge is…It’s how to learn to testify again, bring testimony to what we do, in an authentic way for now.”
On the plus side, however, Dr Powell says the “openness to new opportunities” has increased over time with growing numbers happy to experiment with how churches operate and are involved in local communities. “That’s a good sign for the church but it’s a long journey.”
