80% of Protestant churchgoers want pastors to address hot topics: survey
Four out of five Protestant churchgoers in the United States believe pastors should address current issues, according to a new report.
According to a Lifeway report released Tuesday, 80% of Protestants “believe a pastor must address current issues to be doing their job,” while 16% don't and 4% are unsure.
Some 62% of respondents said their pastor addressed current issues either “every week” or “almost every week,” while 23% said they spoke about them “at least once a month,” and 12% said they spoke about them “rarely” or “several times a year.”
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Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, was quoted in the report as saying that, as the “culture increasingly includes fewer overtly Christian elements and more non-Christian ideas, churchgoers are hungry to know what the Bible says about life’s issues.”
“Churchgoers notice that most pastors are not just preaching from the Bible as a historical document,” stated McConnell. “Pastors seek to explain the original meaning and context, but then apply those principles to issues and situations today. Such application of the biblical text helps churchgoers recognize its relevance.”
The report also found that Methodists (96%) and members of Restorationist Movement churches (89%) were among the most likely to believe pastors should address current issues, while churchgoers aged 65 and older were among the most likely to disagree that pastors have to address current issues (22%).
The report drew from an online survey of 1,008 U.S. Protestant churchgoers conducted Sept. 19-29, 2023, with the margin of error of plus or minus 3.2% at the 95% confidence level.
Earlier this month, Lifeway released a report saying that “the percentage of Americans who see pastors endorsing a candidate in church as appropriate has risen steadily over the past 16 years.”
In the earlier report, Lifeway found that while only 13% of respondents in 2008 found pastors endorsing a candidate in church as appropriate, that number grew to 29% this year.
Additionally, regarding whether it was “appropriate for a church to publicly endorse candidates for public office,” support for this increased from 22% in 2008 to 32% this year.
The research comes as the United States nears the presidential election, which pits Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican challenger and former President Donald Trump.
Both major party candidates have made appeals to various churches and Christian groups. Trump also addressed the prominent Catholic charity event, the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, last week, while Harris was the first presidential candidate in 40 years to skip the dinner. However, she spoke at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, on Sunday, and at Koinonia Christian Center Church in Greenville, North Carolina, the previous week.
