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The Spiritual Landscape of KC
By admin | January 30, 2007
The Kansas City Metro has 1,947,694 people (as of 2005).
1,219,625 of those people do not attend any kind of church on a given weekend (*new figure trying to reflect AA religious Adherents and estimate of growth since 2000*)
63% of the KC Metro does not attend a Christian Church on any given weekend. (The Heartland Project places this number at 68% - From personal conversation)
Update: I am working on acquiring research more specific to the Northland which is the first area we will land as a multisite wannabe church.
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Topics: Church Planting |
January 31st, 2007 at 8:55 am
Jason,
Thanks for stopping by my blog. I apologize in advance for the length of this comment. At your suggestion, you can delete it and I’ll post it on my site.
I was shocked by the number 73% …. Most estimates I’ve seen place the religious adherence rate of nearly every state in the country at about 65%, which means 35% is the ceiling for “unchurched.� I can believe that Kansas City might be different, but THAT different?
So I spent a little time trying to replicate the 73% number and this is what I found….
According to ARDA (the American Religious Data Archive there were 1,776,062 people in the Kansas City Metro Area (KS-MO) in 2000. 856,117 of these were religious adherents. Therefore, 52 %, not 73% of the people in Kansas City Metro might be considered “unchurched� but this is probably an overestimate as well. The data set ARDA is reporting does not include responses from historically African American denominations. Thus, churched African Americans are seriously under-represented in their numbers.
Data from the census bureau allows us to estimate that 12.64 percent of the population in Kansas City Metro is African American. Assuming that all African Americans who go to church go to a “historically African American denomination church� (which is clearly not true and therefore over compensates for their previously being under-counted) and that African Americans have the same church adherence rates that we previously estimated for the whole population (48% churched, which is a likely to be an under estimate because most studies show higher rates of church attendance among African Americans than the rest of the population), we can decompose the 919,945 “unchurched� Kansas Cityians into African American (116,281) and other (803,664) and then estimate that 52% of the African Americans are “unchurched�. When these (60230) are added to 803,664 we get 863,894 as an estimate of the number of unchurched people in KC. Dividing this by the number people in KS this yields 48.64% as the share of KS that is unchurched rather than 73%.
Now its possible that things have changed a lot between 2000 and 2005, but I’d be surprised if that had changed that much. My point here isn’t to play “I gotcha� … and its unfortunate that this would be our first exchange, my point is to say that we should treat the statistics we encounter with a critical eye – especially when we are going to post them in a place where others might view them uncritically as well.
I also think that is not a good idea to start a church plant with the idea that the region we are moving into is almost entirely unchurched. [I was part of a church plant in Metro NYC a half dozen years ago and were encouraged by outsiders to views metro NYC as “unchurched.� Having grown up in metro NYC I knew that was wrong.
First, overestimating the unchurched nature of a region fuels unreasonable expectations about how effective you might be … “look at all the low hanging fruit… we should be able to grow rapidly right out of the gate�. Second, it can lead you to underestimate the work of the saints that came before you, which leads you to underestimate the number of potential ministry partners you have in the area and lean too heavily on “foreign� resources.
These are particularly important issues in an urban environment where one can easily convince yourself that urban areas are largely unchurched and that its “hard to do ministry� in urban environments.
As a consequence of all this you could easily find yourself vacillating between irrational exuberance – “look at all those fish!� and despair “nobody else could effectively fish these waters, what makes me think I can?�
Recognizing that your mission field isn’t much different than everywhere else may help you avoid these extremes.
In love,
Bill
January 31st, 2007 at 10:15 am
You are right about the African American population not adequately reflected. But I think, no I know, you are wrong about the church adherence in the city. Based solely upon ARDA you will see they include Jewish adherent, Buddhist, Muslim, Community of Christ, Latter Day Saints. I’m not saying you are doing this, but to include those groups in any semblance of “Christian people” would be a vast mistake. So because of that the number drops dramatically. Secondly, I used more up to date population numbers (from 2005) but the religious adherence list comes from 2,000…So there is probably some change (upward? downward?) in religious adherence. So I’m sorry if that was misleading. It was never my goal to provide some kind of “scientific stat.”
For me it actually does the opposite of what you describe. I don’t think look at the low hanging fruit, I look at the enormity of the task. Whatever stat you’d like to see, even it is 25% unchurched there would still be over half a million without Jesus.
I don’t think the experience is much different than anywhere else. And on that note, in a conversation with The Heartland Project they claim 68% of the metro is unchurched. So I was a bit higher than they were in the statement, but not significantly so. And your figures are quite lower than what they even project.
Finally, I definitely don’t underestimate what others are doing. You don’t know me, so how could you know this, but I constantly say we are going into the area with the understanding that there are great churches already in place. There is just need for more and different kinds of churches.
Thanks for your comment. I will look into adjusting my post, taking into account some of what you say.