Charistatistics
In the course of writing a Briefing article about the charismatic movement (coming up in the November issue), I was trying to work out roughly how many ‘charismatics’ or ‘pentecostals’ there were in Australia. I went to the website of the ‘Australian Christian Churches’ (ACC), a denominational alliance that includes just about all the main pentecostal churches and groupings in the country (the Assemblies of God, the Apostolic Churches, Bethesda Ministries, the Christian Life Churches, and so on).
According to the ACC's publicity, more than 190,000 people attend ACC churches each week, making it second only to Roman Catholicism in size as a denomination—an impressive claim, and a meteoric rise for pentecostalism. It made me a little suspicious, however, and so I dug around to find the source of the figure. Eventually I discovered that it came from the 2001 Census, where 194,592 people wrote ‘Pentecostal’ or ‘Australian Christian Churches’ at question 19 on the form.
This changes things quite a bit. For one thing it assumes that everybody who wrote ‘pentecostal’ is now part of a church affiliated with ACC, which is almost certainly not the case. The second thing that the figure assumes is that the number from the Census is equivalent to how many people actually go to church. If we were to use this methodology on the other denominations, then according to the Census the ACC is way back in 7th place, dwarfed by Catholicism (5 million), Anglicanism (3.9 million), the Uniting Church (1.25 million) and so on.
What the ACC doesn't mention, or doesn't realise, is that vastly more people indicate affiliation to denominations on Census forms than actually attend church each week. In the case of Anglicanism, less than 5% of those who say they are ‘C of E’ actually go to church on a weekly basis!
So how many people do go to pentecostal churches? The best estimate is that provided by the most recent National Church Life Survey in 2001. When all the groups that could reasonably be called ‘pentecostal’ or ‘charismatic’ are combined, the NCLS estimates the weekly attendance figure at around 141,000, which is just over 70% of those who say they are ‘pentecostal’ in the Census. This is not a bad figure, or a bad percentage (especially compared to the Anglicans!). It makes the ACC the third largest denominational grouping behind the Catholics and the Anglicans, who have 760,000 and 177,000 weekly attendees respectively.
The only problem is: it's around 50,000 (or 35%) short of what the ACC are claiming.
Now what would be truly interesting would be some accurate figures on how many of the three quarters of a million or so Protestant weekly church goers are evangelicals. My best guess is around 300,000 (or 40%). But I wouldn't want to base too much on it—it's only a statistic after all.