Wheat And Chaff: A Three-Year Post-Mortem On Evangelical Church Attendance

The first pages of the New Testament open with John the Baptist likening the ministry of Jesus Christ to the work of a winnowing fork: a tool used by farmers to toss stalks of grain into the air, separating the wheat that would fall to the ground and collected into the farmer’s barn from the unwanted chaff that would be blown away with the wind and later burned.

American evangelical ministers concur that the advent of government lockdown mandates and the social justice movement that began nearly three years ago and continue to reverberate across the nation’s cultural landscape ultimately served to sift their congregations. Attendance had declined to 85% of pre-lockdown levels in Protestant churches even as nearly every church in the country resumed normal worship services, according to a study from Lifeway Research. Some 34% of professing Christians said they attended church four times per month or more before the lockdowns, a figure which declined to 26% by the spring of 2022.