Congregation Stats (January 2022)

TL;DR — our church membership has remained very stable over the last year; praise the Lord! The goodbyes we have said have been primarily due to people moving away from the city for work or family reasons, not due to falling away from the faith or unreconcilable conflicts.

Over the last year, if you have been wondering who is still an engaged part of the First Free church family, I’m writing this update to encourage you! We have a faithful and active group of member families, along with many long-time regular attenders who have not yet taken the step to membership.

Before I go any further in giving you some fun First Free stats, let me put this into context nationally. According to a Barna study in 2020, the average loss or disengagement of practicing Christians from their churches was 32%. This is not a shift from in-person to virtual attendance; it’s a total “drop-out” rate. Along a similar trend, the Gallup poll organization has studied Americans’ participation in houses of worship (they look at churches, synagogues, and mosques), and in 2021 they reported that total Americans who say they belong to a place of worship (any of those three) had dropped below 50% for the first time in eight decades. This is a sobering reality and reminds me of Jesus’ words to his disciples, recorded in Matthew 9:

And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

As you’re reading this, take a moment now to stop and pray earnestly to the Lord. Praise him for his faithfulness, goodness, and holiness. Pray for strength through the power of the Holy Spirit for the laborers who are few. Pray for the Lord to send out laborers into his harvest to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom as Jesus did.

Amen.

At First Free, we have not followed these national trends at all. We have seen a loss of only about 10% of our members over the last year, and most of those were people who moved away from the city of Chicago. (Illinois broke a record for population loss in 2021.) A small handful of members decided to change to a church closer to where they lived in the city so they could be more effective in outreach to their neighbors. Remember our Farewell Benediction gathering in the back parking lot in September 2021? It was a sweet time of thankfulness for and blessing to our beloved sisters and brothers who were moving away. It is always hard to say goodbye, and it is okay to feel the grief and loss of valuable members of our Body. We can do that and also rejoice that these fellow believers have not “dropped out” but rather they have been “sent out” from our family to build the kingdom in other places. It is in our church DNA to be a “sending church” – to equip, encourage, and send out believers to serve Jesus all throughout the world.

Explanation of Terms

Before I continue to share the detailed stats, let me take a moment to explain the vocab I’ll be using:

• Members: adults who have committed to First Free church and who have gone through the membership process
• Regular attenders: non-member adults who attend First Free church regularly (a few of these are spouses of members)
• Member children: all kids and youth ages 0-18; this count does not include college-age children of members
• Regular attender children: all kids and youth ages 0-18 whose parents are not members, but they attend church regularly

Drum roll please…. Our current congregation size (all ages) = 165 people!!

This count is accurate as of January 25, 2022. Here is the breakdown of the people who belong to our Body, our fellowship:

• 80 members (adults)
• 29 regular attenders (adults)
• 48 member children (ages 0-18)
• 8 regular attender children (ages 0-18)
  Note: this count does not include people in the “visitor” category. We get new visitors almost every single Sunday and have since we re-opened in-person church services in August 2020. A visitor becomes a “regular attender” when she or he has been coming to most church services for a few months or has plugged in to serve in a ministry area.

Member in-person attendance

• We have observed that 72 of 80 members have attended at least one in-person service since August 2021. If we look at the cold-weather and holiday travel season, between November 2021 – January 2022, 66 of 80 members have continued to attend in-person.
• The elders, membership team, and staff are actively following up with the 8 members who haven’t come to church in person since the summer of 2021 or earlier to find out how they are doing and whether or not they are engaged virtually.

Total weekly in-person attendance
If you’d like a breakdown of data, read on! These numbers include all ages, not just adults, since it is pulled from PCO check-ins. (PCO = Planning Center Online, our church database)

…January average attendance: 57 people

We always have a dip in January’s attendance with weather issues and seasonal illnesses, however the dip was larger this January because of the Covid surge in Chicago. Many members and regular attenders were streaming services instead of attending in-person because they were subject to isolation or quarantine requirements.

• 77 on Jan 30 (still some remnants of the Covid surge)
• 50 on Jan 23 (Covid surge)
• 69 on Jan 16 (Covid surge)
• 50 on Jan 9 (Covid surge)
• 42 on Jan 2 (holiday weekend)

…December average attendance: 74 people

• 35 on Dec 26 (holiday weekend)
• 74 on Dec 19
• 99 on Dec 12
• 89 on Dec 5

…November average attendance: 89 people

• 71 on Nov 28
• 104 on Nov 21
• 86 on Nov 14
• 96 on Nov 7

…October average attendance: 88 people

• 84 on Oct 31
• 101 on Oct 24
• 82 on Oct 17
• 72 on Oct 10
• 102 on Oct 3

If we average the weekly attendance between October 3 – December 19, 2021, we sit solidly at 88 people in church on every Sunday. Out of 165 total congregants, this is a weekly in-person attendance rate of 53% of the congregation.

One last piece of data to look at: Members participating in votes
While members are anonymous when they vote on church business issues, we do keep record of who has received (and returned) a ballot, to make sure we are counting them correctly. Therefore we know which members are participating in votes, while we retain anonymity in how they voted. Our participation rate has remained very steady over the last 2 years. We would love to see this rate be even higher, so we reach consensus on church business issues with all voices participating. But the rate of around 60-70% voting has been characteristic for many years. Here is a look at the last two years:

• Jan. 30, 2022 vote: 48 out of 80 members participated (60%)
• Oct. 24, 2021 vote: (data coming soon)
• Aug. 1, 2021: no vote, but 54 attended the MCM in person
• May 2, 2021 vote: 49 members participated (the MCM was live Zoom)
• Feb. 7, 2021 vote: 44 members participated (the MCM was a pre-recorded video)
• Oct. 25, 2020 vote: 51 members participated (the MCM was a pre-recorded video)
• Aug. 16, 2020 vote: 54 members participated

In closing, let us remember that we are built upon the solid rock of Jesus Christ. He is the Living Word, our Redeemer! He is the head of the church, and he knows the plans he has for us. It is a joy and honor to join God in his work of calling the lost to be found, the hopeless to have hope, the broken to be made whole. There are millions of people in our city who need to hear the life changing message of the Gospel and who need to experience God’s generous love firsthand. May we find regular rhythms of rest in our Creator’s presence, so we can be filled up and follow hard after him.

With love in Christ,

Rachel Einfeldt, elder