So What Do People Think Of Church?

Our first project as a team was based around a question: how do people outside church walls view the church? And how does that differ from those who are regular church goers? The '6 Words About Church' Survey sought to answer this question. In total, we polled 1,300 people from across the diocese, state, and nation. Less than 23% of those polled classified themselves as not regularly attending church.While we would have liked to see that number closer to 50%, most unchurched people seemed to respond along similar lines.

To display our results, I've generated two Wordles. Try to guess which one is from people who are unchurched and those who are churched. (The size of each word is proportional to its frequency of being a word in people's responses.)

On the surface, they seem rather similar. The top responses in both categories include the words worship, love, peace, family, faith, prayer, jesus, god, music, and community. However, if you look at the smaller words the differences become clear.
If you haven't already guessed, the lower Wordle is from unchurched people. It's common words such as brainwashing, boring, hypocritical and others are where the contrast between the two groups is most evident.

Looking at the Wordle from regular attenders of church also has some interesting qualities. It appears that it has much less variety when it comes to responses than the unchurched. This illusion (if I can use that word?) is caused by the word 'community'. It had twice the number of occurrences than the next most popular word, love. So all the other words simply are in too small a font to see at this scale.

So to wrap this up. The majority of people, churched or not, see the church as a community, a family, a place to worship, a place to pray. Some people, slightly more unchurched than churched, see the church as a building. It was stained glass windows, some are Catholic, it has a religion, it is a place, it takes out time on Sunday morning. And a few people, more unchurched than not, have been very hurt by the church, and likely continue to be.

Each person sees the church from their perspective. A completely honest perspective, despite strong differences in opinion to others. From my perspective, I see the church as a having a mission to fulfill. The church is meant to do nothing else than incarnate the Body of Christ. Loving, Helping, Teaching, Serving, Hoping, Believing. Now that we know where we are, we can set out to where we are going.