Well, welcome to the podcast.

And before we dive into today's episode, I am here with David Kinneman, and we are doing our monthly State of the Church update.

And David, I want to talk for a couple of minutes about some of the surprising data, like actually more encouraging data, about trends you've uncovered related to church attendance among young adults.

What are you seeing?

Well, we found some really interesting data that I think will encourage church leaders,

and that is that millennials and Gen Z are now the most frequent churchgoers.

That is reversing decades of trends where older adults are usually the most likely and

regular church attenders. So I actually think we've come up with a way of measuring church attendance that is more

relevant to pastors.

Typically, social researchers talk about have you attended church in the last seven days,

yes or no.

That is subject to people's, let's say, halo effect or lying about their attendance, but, you know,

we know that it's about a third.

Exaggerating.

About a third of all Americans say they've attended in the last seven days.

That's up somewhat from the last couple years, and it's up significantly from COVID.

But what we came up with was a way of measuring among active churchgoers the number of

times per month that they attend.

So we know that the average is 1.6 times per month that a churchgoer attends.

I think that's very relevant to church leaders because you know,

you're looking at like how many times will people come?

That's a little bit less than 40% of the time.

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