Are you too old for church?
A Review of Church Demographics (July 24, 2023)
Imagine you are an entrepreneur who decides to open a high-end cafe. You selected a new and vibrant neighbourhood in the city that is mostly populated by young professionals. Your café does exceptionally well. The demand for living in the neighbourhood is so great that developers built several high-rise condo buildings, doubling the population of the area, including the number of young professionals. Then the café’s business drops significantly. What gives?
All things equal, this would likely not happen to such a business. Yet, it is exactly what did happen in Canadian churches.
Drop into any mainstream church and, with some exceptions, you will see a predominance of white and grey hair. Over the last couple of decades you will have noticed that it became more like this every passing year. You could say the elderly are now the Church’s primary ‘clients’.
One easy conclusion is that people look to their afterlife with more fervour the nearer they draw to this end-of-life transition. It’s a little like the employee retirement seminars you get to go to in some organizations as you near retirement age. However, there are way more elderly people in Canada now than ever before and churches are losing members rapidly. Let’s look at the numbers.
We’ll examine a group of four cohorts that range from 60 years old to 80 years old. In 2002, Canada had around 4.3 million people in this group. In 2022, twenty years later, the number increased to 8.2 million. These cohorts almost doubled at a time when Canada’s total population went up only 24%.1 Further, rapidly improving medical pharmaceuticals, technologies and practices have made life as an elder much more mobile than ever before, thus increasing their general ability to go to church.
Obviously, our off-the-cuff assumption that seniors’ attendance is a nearer-to-Heaven matter is not holding water. The forces at play that are reducing church attendance are affecting all age groups. Statistics show that the religiosity of people in the older cohorts has indeed dropped. Statistics Canada polled on this issue2 and found that individuals born in the period 1940 to 1949 decreased their likelihood of attending church from 42.7% in 1985 to 28.7% in 2019 (a 33% drop). People born in the period of 1950 to 1959 dropped from 31.5% to 18.8% (a 40% drop). Compare this to a younger cohort (born between 1970 and 1979), which declined by 32% between 1994 and 2019; a somewhat similar amount.
Aging doesn’t seem to be a limiting factor in the decline of religiosity. Church planning will need to be mindful of this fact.
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1. Statistics Canada, Population estimates on July 1st, by age and sex,
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000501&pickMembers%5B0%5D=1.1&pickMembers%5B1%5D=2.1&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2002&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2022&referencePeriods=20020101%2C20220101
2. Statistics Canada, Religiosity in Canada and its evolution from 1985 to 2019,
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2021001/article/00010-eng.htm