In Oregon this past weekend 170 church workers attended a workshop on church hospitality sponsored by Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon. Catholics, Protestants and Evangelicals gathered for the day at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral the Sentinel reports.
Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, spoke to the gathering. His eighteen page slide presentation, Changing American Religious Landscape, is available at the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon website. It is a useful distillation of Pew research that would be a good jumping off place for church evangelism committees. Of course Precept information will tell you more about the unchurched in your community.
Lugo’s presentation gets you thinking about unchurched, or as he terms them the unaffiliated (atheists, agnostics, secular unaffiliated and religious unaffiliated). Would good hospitality towards the secular unaffiliated look the same as towards the religious unaffiliated?
Then there’s a comparison of adult affiliation with the childhood affiliation (not surprisingly Catholic are down the most — the comparison forces you to look at how many members that church has lost because adults left the church of their childhood).
Protestants as a whole have actually been losing members slightly faster than Catholics, but Catholics losing far more of the native born to the Protestants than the reverse. What does hospitality towards disaffected Catholics look like?
There are many more nuggets covering immigration, ethnicity, and fertility.
When you think of church hospitality what do you think of? The refreshments committee or the evangelism committee?