There seems to be a steady drumbeat that indicates that church attendance is not what we thought it to be.  It is lower.  Here is the latest info from the Washington Post.

The Southern Baptist Convention, with 16.3 million members on the
books, claims to be the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. But
the Rev. Thomas Ascol believes the active membership is really a
fraction of that.

Ascol, pastor of the 230-member Grace Baptist
Church in Cape Coral, Fla., points to a church report showing that only
6 million Southern Baptists attend church on an average Sunday.

"The reality is, the FBI couldn’t find half of those if they had
to," said Ascol of the claimed members. He asserts that his
congregation’s attendance swells to at least 350 every Sunday.

Next
month, Ascol plans to bring a resolution to the denomination’s annual
meeting in San Antonio calling for "integrity in the way we regard our
membership rolls in our churches and also in the way we report
statistics."

….

Vast differences in theology and accounting practices make it nearly
impossible to really know how many members a church body has, whether
active or occasional worshipers. That, in turn, makes side-by-side
comparisons nearly impossible.

The Rev. Eileen W. Lindner, deputy
general secretary of the National Council of Churches USA, produces the
NCC’s annual Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, which is
widely seen as an authoritative source for church membership
statistics. But even she acknowledges that there are limits.

"Church
membership is not as straightforward as it seems," said Lindner, a
Presbyterian. "It’s not like, ‘Who’s a member of Costco?’

According to the story reasons for poor numbers include…

  1. Self-Reporting. Numbers are only as reliable as the church
    officials who collect them. "For some, very careful counts are made of
    members," the yearbook says. "Other groups only make estimates."
  2. Theology. Often, a church’s understanding of membership — how
    it is started, how it is maintained and how it can be revoked –
    influences counts.
  3. Active Membership. Roman Catholics, the largest U.S. church with
    a reported 69 million members, start counting baptized infants as
    members and often don’t remove people until they die. Most membership
    surveys don’t actually count the people in the pews on Sunday.
  4. Institutional Honesty. Mainline Protestant churches –
    Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and others — have been
    hemorrhaging members for 40 years. And those churches are often the
    first to cleanse their rolls of the inactive to produce a more accurate
    figure.
  5. Survey Guilt. When asked about voting habits, belief in God or
    their feelings toward race or gender, Americans are notorious for
    answering what they think pollsters want to hear. Church demographers
    say the same rings true for church attendance.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/18/AR2007051801701.html

My first senior pastor also taught me to add 10% to your attendance numbers for those who were in the bathroom when you counted.

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