Travel to church

By Deborah Bruce

How long does it take you to get to church? Half of worshipers (56%) can reach their congregation within 10 minutes. Yet, one in ten travel for more than 20 minutes to attend worship.

Catholic parishes are geographically based, so it's not surprising that six in ten who worship in Catholic churches (61%) travel 10 minutes or less to church. Conservative Protestants spend the most amount of time traveling to church—only four in ten (45%) can get there in 10 minutes, and another third (36%) take between 11 and 20 minutes to get to church. Mainline Protestants are in the middle with half (54%) spending no more than 10 minutes traveling to worship, another third (35%) traveling for 11 to 20 minutes.

Does travel time make a difference?  Yes! Those few worshipers (3%) overall who travel more than 30 minutes to church have lower rates of participation in congregational life than worshipers who can get to church in less time. But there is little difference in participation rates among those who travel 30 minutes or less to church.

Participation Rates by Travel Time to Worship

	1-10 min.	11-30 min.	More than 30 min.
Attend worship weekly    or more often	78%	76%	59%
Hold a leadership role	43%	44%	33%
Participate in congregation’s     church school or     religious education classes	18%	20%	12%
Participate in congregation’s     prayer or Bible study groups	18%	20%	15%
Participate in congregation’s     fellowship or social groups	28%	29%	20%
Participate in congregation’s     community service work	17%	18%	14%

What does this mean? Worshipers in your congregation who travel more than 30 minutes to worship may be less engaged in the life and mission of the congregation. What steps can congregational leaders take to help such worshipers stay connected to the congregation?

And congregations where lots of worshipers travel long distances to worship face particular challenges. Think of the historic downtown church in a large city, where most of the worshipers drive in from the suburbs on Sunday morning. These destination commuter churches may have difficulty finding volunteers to fill leadership positions that require returning to church a second time during the week. Attendance at mid-week or Saturday Bible study and fellowship groups or mission activities might be sparse. In addition, serving and getting to know those in the local community may be difficult. Yet having lots of long-distance commuters can give a church other strengths—because their worshipers come from a broad variety of locations and backgrounds, they have connections to other networks or friends, colleagues, and resources that can be accessed to support the ministry of the congregation.

What is the drive-time distribution of your worshipers? How is that influencing the congregation's mission and ministry?

Comments

[Steve Salyards]

Do the percentages come with the usual +/-4% error bars? i.e. 1-10 and 11-30 groups are statistically indistinguishable.

[Deborah Bruce]

Steve--

The margin of error is somewhat smaller than + or - 4% because the sample is so large. Over 64,000 worshipers participated in this survey.