Does church attendance always provide an emotional lift?

Christians get an emotional lift from attending church – but not if they go only a few times a year, a new study reveals. Researchers found that regular weekend church attendance leads to an increase in positive emotions and a decrease in negative ones. Subjects in the study who did not attend church regularly, however, experienced no change in their emotional well-being.

“In order to experience a positive emotional benefit from going to church, you have to not only attend but attend regularly,” said Blake Victor Kent, lead author of the study and associate professor of sociology at Westmont College. “This is probably because in order to benefit, you need to be familiar with the routines, the style of worship and the people with whom you are worshiping. If not, you just aren’t able to participate with the same level of familiarity and the social connections just aren’t there. Thus, there is little or no emotional impact.”

READ: For people who stopped attending, they gave up a lot

The study is based on data collected from 2,869 U.S. adults highlights what happens in the emotional lives of religious service attendees after they participate in a religious service. Participants in the study were asked to complete questionnaires daily over two weeks to gauge their attendance at religious services.

To capture the emotional state of participants after they attended church services, researchers included the following question in a survey participants received on Sunday nights: “Did you attend a religious service this past weekend?” Participants in the study also were asked to respond to multiple questions about their emotional well-being.

Fewer than half of Americans hold formal memberships at a church, and more Protestant churches are closing than opening nationwide. Further decline also appears inevitable, according to estimates made by the Lifeway Research. In 2019, well before many churches were forced to close because of the coronavirus pandemic, Lifeway Research found that although approximately 3,000 Protestant churches were started in the United States, 4,500 had closed.

–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice