Global church attendance trends: In the last post, I looked at trends in global church attendance over two time periods--1981 and 2001. The problem with the analysis is that two samples included different countries, and it might be that the 2001 sample included more of the developing world which tends to be more religious. I'm very busy right now, but I will update this post with additional countries, as I find the time.

My first choice of countries is China since it is the largest. It was surveyed in 1990 and 2001. The percent never attending religious services declined from 94.1% to 89.6%. The largest growth was in the more frequent attendance categories. Of course the numbers are still low, but hey, this is China.

India: Attendance in India is down bigtime over the same period. The biggest drop was among those going more than once a week from 29.4% to 15.3%. Almost everyone goes, but not so often.

USA: America remain unchanged between 1982 and 1999.

Nigeria: Between 1990 and 2000, the biggest change is more people going more than once a week: from 55.5% to 63.7%. Now that's religious.

Russia: During the 90s, the trend was for those who go never or rarely to begin to go for Christmas and Easter and other holy days: this category rose from 7.9% to 22.6%.

Mexico: From 1990 to 2000, the percent attending weekly went from 31.6% to 42.5%.