Does your church’s growth plan rely on unhappy people?

Life Satisfaction, Stress, Health and Education Trends in Canada (June 1, 2023)

Many pastors have stressed the great spiritual gift of being able to hand over your burdens to Jesus so he can both support and guide you through life’s travails.  This leads me to wonder if churches are somewhat dependent on such life pressures to bring people through their doors.  Churches likely do not consciously think this, but they do consciously strive to comfort people who are burdened; and rightly so.  

Anecdotally, it would seem that there is a great field of troubled people from which to harvest.  Everyone ‘knows’ that stress is on the rise and is getting to critical levels these days.  We know that health services are getting harder to access, and family cohesiveness is breaking down.  Wages are stagnating, mostly due to a shift towards casual and part-time work. 

So, is it really getting worse for people?  Lucky for us, Statistics Canada does have some figures to ponder.  I will draw from some surveys conducted in 20081.  Though they are a little dated, most population trends do not change very rapidly, so I think we can learn a bit from this data.  

The most interesting data item to me was a survey of life satisfaction during the period 2003 to 2008.  In 2008, 91.4% of Canada’s population said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their life.  This figure held constant for the full five years of this analysis.  

Does this mean that people are just not being stressed out anymore?  Actually, no it doesn’t.  22.3% of Canadians said they had quite a bit of stress in their life.  Interestingly, this dropped two percentage points over five years.  I draw from this that high stress is not a major factor in many people’s conception of life satisfaction.  Like work and family life, it is just a natural, expected component.  And for some, who claim to like the challenges of stress in their life, it may even boost satisfaction levels.  

There is no doubt that health plays a significant role in life satisfaction.  However, I imagine this is more true for unexpected and serious health issues (e.g., heart disease, cancer) than commonly reported endemic diseases such as high blood pressure (reported by16.4%), obesity (reported by 17.2%), and arthritis (reported by 15.3%).  People react poorly to perceptions of unfairness, and unexpected dire health issues can seem unfair.  If you have a health condition that many around you have, there is less sense of unfairness.  Thus, even though only 58.9% of Canadians say they have very good or excellent health, this doesn’t seem to be pulling life satisfaction ratings down.  Also, we should take some comfort from the fact that life expectancy, measured at birth and measured at age 65, continues to rise in Canada.  

Education levels also continue to rise, and women are now dominating enrolment at universities.  Higher education translates to more opportunity, which should translate to higher life satisfaction. 

Meanwhile, church attendance is dropping.  You might think that this would have a negative impact on life satisfaction, but it does not appear to.

Accordingly, churches should be aware that some very content people are in their pews, and visitors are not necessarily there to find relief.  They are mostly a bunch of relatively satisfied people looking to remain satisfied in a life of service to God.  Gearing church programs towards making adherents more satisfied with life probably will not resonate as well as it did in bygone days.

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1. Statistics Canada, Social fact sheet,

     https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-008-x/2010001/article/11132-eng.htm