Faith Based Business
In a survey of people ages 18 to 65, The Barna Group found that a business’ affiliation with Christianity made little difference to consumers. The overwhelming majority (58%) said that it made no difference to them whether a company embraced and promoted a Christian faith. Some 22% indicated they would be a lot more likely to buy from a Christian based company while 15% said they would be only slightly more influenced to buy. Only 3% of those polled indicated that a Christian affiliation would make them less likely to be supporters of a particular business.
Source: The Barna Group, February 14, 2011
A Church Membership Decline
According to the 2011 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, most Christian denominations saw little growth in membership over the last year. Overall church membership saw a 1% decline in the last year with about 145 million people (out of the 345 million total population in the U.S. and Canada) declaring a church membership. The Southern Baptist Convention ranks second behind only the Catholic Church in overall membership in the U.S. with 16.1 million declared Southern Baptists in the country. However, even the SBC saw a slight .42% drop in membership over the last year.
Source: USA Today, February 15, 2011
this & that
Population Boom
Fast-growing areas of the South like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., ranked among the largest gainers of Asian and Hispanic populations from 2000 to 2008.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
Tithing Truth
Though most profess to tithe the standard 10% of their income to the church, the actual average percentage of income given to churches in the last two years was only 2.43%. This number has declined over the last 40 years, with the highest amount being only 3.11% in 1968.
Source: Christianity Today, February 2011
Twitter Surge
When Twitter debuted in 2007, users collectively posted about 5,000 tweets per day. At the beginning of 2011, that number had increased significantly, with Twitter users ‘tweeting’ a collective 95 million posts each day.
Source: World Magazine, January 1, 2011
Church Dropouts
Some 20% of students who stopped attending church after high school say they had planned to no longer attend weekly services once they were in college. The other 80% of those who “dropped out” of church after high school say they made no premeditated decision to do so, but rather, slowly drifted out of church.
Source: Lifeway Research
ON MISSION • Summer 2011 9
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