Penny Long Marler

Testing the Attendance Gap in a Conservative Church

This paper examines the overreporting of attendance at a large evangelical church using a poll of church members conducted during the seven days following a specific Sunday morning worship service. It provides a direct (temporal and individual) test of the connection between self-reported church attendance and actual, observed attendance. Overreporting was found for worship attendance even when the attendance rate was adjusted by removing non-worship events. More importantly, by comparing poll responses to attendance records kept by the church, it was possible to determine both the rate of Sunday school attendance overreporting and which adult members misreported their attendance. Most of those who said they attended Sunday school, but who in fact did not, were active church members who claim to attend church every week

Back to the future: Why the Sunday school is key to denominational identity and growth

This article is an historical and sociological analysis of the rise of the Sunday school movement, the “Southern Baptization” of that movement, and its growth and subsequent decline. Two related points are central to the argument: (a) the irony of the movement’s evolution from nondenominational Protestantism to Southern Baptist denominationalism to nondenominational evangelicalism; and (b) in a context of social and economic transformations that undermine not only the roots of the movement’s growth but also compromise its attendant fruits, the Sunday school’s continued importance for the religious socialization of successive generations. From the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, denominationalism meant identity and growth, and the Sunday school drove both, first in Great Britain and later in the United States. The decline of the Sunday school for adults and then for children led to the erosion of denominationalism, especially from the 1960s onward. Research suggests that parental involvement in a religious tradition, children’s simultaneous age-graded religious education, and worship together (still) promote religious identity and assure continued church involvement across the lifespan. So what can be done?

Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice@@@Young Catholics at the New Millennium: The Religion and Morality of Young Adults in Western Countries

Leaders of the American Catholic community want to and need to reach out to young adults. But effective ministry to young adults means that church leaders have to understand the attitudes and the needs of the current generation of Catholics in their 20s and 30s. This is why Dean Hoge, William Dinges, Mary Johnson, and Juan Gonzales began their study of young adult Catholics. How do both European-American and Latino Catholics actually live their Catholicism? Are they alienated from the Church? Are they cynical about the Churchs moral teachings? Do they take the Popes statements seriously? Do they attend Mass? Have significant numbers left for other churches? Do they want Catholic education for their children? Seeking answers to these and other questions, Dean Hoge and his colleagues conducted a national survey in 1997, supplemented by a telephone survey and then by personal interviews with over 800 men and women across the country. The interviews put a human face on the information provided, and they form a compelling part of this timely narrative. The authors underscore observations that include the strength and tenacity of Catholic identity in spite of many challenges, the high level of personal decision-making among those interviewed and surveyed, and the readiness of young Catholics for institutional reforms.