In-person Worship
at 10am

With many churches, synagogues, mosques and temples reopening or lifting capacity limits as more Americans are vaccinated, in-person attendance is rebounding. United Church plans to reopen on Sunday 12 September at 10:00 am.  Our worship service will be held on the third floor in Overdier Hall.  This is a temporary place for worship until the Morse Avenue stairs are replaced and the new lift is installed for full access to our sanctuary.

we are still asking folks to wear masks.

This Sunday 3 October will be a Co-Op Worship with Big Shoulders and Grace Church of Logan Square. The Co-Op worship was during the heart of Covid-19 for the past year and a half. Due to building usage, Grace Church has changed their worship time early. So, this Sunday 3 October is a pre-recorded service. People who gather for UCRP worship will be watching it on the big screen.

Worship together as a Co-Op or worship just UCRP alone.

During June 2021, twenty percent of United States adults report that they have attended a place of worship in person in the past week and another 10% say they have participated virtually.

When this question was last asked, in December 2020, slightly more Americans were still attending remotely [16%] rather than in person [13%]. In contrast, last May, just 3% of U.S. adults said they had attended a house of worship in person, while 28% had done so remotely. Across the entire year, the proportion using some means to participate in a worship service stayed steady near three in 10.

That is the good news.

The bad news is overall church attendance has been dropping slowly since 1937 at 73% of United States peoples attended church compared to today.

It dropped in 1999 to 70% .

In 2020, the first time it dropped below the fifty line at 47%.

Religiosity is strongly related to age, with older Americans far more likely than younger adults to be members of churches. However, church membership has dropped among all generational groups over the past two decades, with declines of roughly 10 percentage points among traditionalists, baby boomers and Generation X.

Most millennials were too young to be polled in 1998-2000. Now that they have reached adulthood, their church membership rates are exceedingly low and appear to be a major factor in the drop in overall U.S. church membership. Just 42% of millennials are members of churches, on average.

The pandemic's effect on Americans' practice of their religion has been significant. Church membership in 2020 fell to its lowest point in more than eight decades of Gallup's tracking, and overall religious service attendance [the combined percentage in-person and virtual] also reached an all-time low. The latest data show that even as in-person attendance has increased with fewer closures and capacity limitations, overall attendance remains lower in 2021 than in 2019. As Americans gradually resume their pre-pandemic lives, their participation in religious services may increase further. But as the trend shows, attendance has generally been declining over the past two decades, so a full rebound to what it was two years ago may not occur.

All information is from the Gallup Poll

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