Are church engagement and community investment linked? Barna’s recent study, Inside the Urban Church—created in partnership with World Impact—shows this may be the case, at least in U.S. cities.
This article takes a look at four groups of U.S. adults residing in metro areas to see how church engagement and attendance influence how people show up for their community.
36% of Urban Church Attendees Strongly Agree They Understand Local Needs & Issues
Before we dive into the data, let’s first define what we mean when we say “urban.”
You may hear “urban” used interchangeably or conflated with various terms in conversation, but we want to be precise with how we apply it in our research and this report. Further, as not all respondents in the eight cities (more on this in the methodology) we surveyed are technically analyzed as “urban,” we hope the following definitions provide clarity for your reading:
- “Urban” is defined by a metric used by the U.S. Census Bureau, which refers to any area that includes 425 housing units per square mile. Respondents and churches located in a zip code where housing meets this threshold are classified as “urban.”
- “Nonurban” refers to residents or churches that do not occupy a high-density urban neighborhood in the cities surveyed.
- At times we’ll use the term “metro” as a synonym for all respondents or churches in this study, both urban and nonurban.
