With more Americans pursuing additional church options, demographer George Barna thinks the traditional "churched" and "unchurched" terms need revision.

He argues that basing someone's spiritual life on attendance at conventional church services is out of date, since millions now attend multiple faith communities. That may include a traditional service one week, a house church the next and interaction with online communities in between.

New definitions

Such realities led Barna to define church attenders by five new models:

• Unattached

  People who did not attend a traditional or other form of faith community during the past year, representing nearly 25 percent of adults in the nation.

   

• Intermittents

  People who participated in a traditional or house church the past year, but not during the past month, 15 percent of adults. Two-thirds of this group had attended a church event within the past six months.

   

• Homebodies

  People who had not attended a traditional church service during the past month, but had attended a house church (three percent.)

   

• Blenders

  Adults who had attended both a conventional church and a house in the past month (three percent), the latter an experiment with a new kind of faith community.

   

• Conventionals

  Adults who attended a traditional service during the past month but not a house church (56 percent.) This included a variety of conventional services, whether mid-week, weekend, special events or church-based classes.

Overlapping faith practices

Barna researchers also discovered overlapping faith practices among many people. Fifteen percent of adults who attend traditional church reported experiencing the presence of God through a faith-oriented web site during the past month. Another seven percent said they had such an experience via a real-time event on the Internet.

Thirteen said they had experienced God's presence or expressed their faith via a ministry that met in the marketplace over the past month. A majority of the public claimed to have experienced God's presence through some form of interaction with religious radio or television programs.

Most interesting was Barna's findings about the "Unattached" category that represent opportunities for Christians to reach out during the days leading up to Easter.

Among the characteristics of this group: they were more likely to feel stressed out, less optimistic about the future, more likely to believe that Christ sinned while on the earth, and more likely to believe that Satan and the Holy Spirit are symbolic figures rather than real.

Adjusting our measurements

These findings are interesting because they emphasize the need to adjust the way we measure success in the Church.

Last year I heard about one church that encouraged short-term missions involvement by recording the numbers of members each Sunday who were on the mission field that day instead of in the morning service. A simple change, but one that can have a profound impact on people's thinking.

Likewise, I also heard about pastors resisting holding community Bible studies in restaurants or other neutral venues. Their objection: they couldn't accurately count the number of participants. Seems that trusting the leader to collect that number would easily resolve such problems.

What Barna's study shows is a world exploding with interest in spiritual topics, but just as easily led astray into unbiblical ideas and philosophies. In an age that no longer resembles the past, the Church needs to be out in the world contending for the truth—even if the numbers look different than before.