“Extradition Bill Protest and Church" Research Report 2.0- Online survey among believers and pastors
Ray Bakke Centre for Urban Transformation
Christian Communications Ltd.
CC Leadership Development Institute Ltd.
This quantitative survey aims to understand Christians’ expectation towards churches and how churches have been responding. We have released the first report earlier and the results indicated that churches which more frequently preach sermon messages responding to the social movement, offer counselling services and pastoral presence at protests, can predict church members’ higher satisfaction towards churches. Referring to the analysis from our earlier focus group research, pastors also reckoned the importance of pastoral presence as they can experience life with church congregation.
This research has made use of snowball sampling and was sent out during 10-24 October through seminary, Christian organizations and personal network. The limitation of our research is that our participants are mostly composed by democrats (80%) and younger believers, so this may not be able to reflect the actual landscape of overall Hong Kong believers’ background.
In this second part of the report, we have conducted regression analysis in participants’ level of satisfaction towards church and participants’ background. The result of the analysis indicated that preaching sermon messages responding to the social movement, and offering counselling services are two key predictors of participants’ level of satisfaction towards church. Below are the regression analysis result for the 3,398 regular attendee participants:
Regression Analysis for Satisfaction towards Church and Participants’ View
**p<0.05，level of satisfaction is significantly lower *Participants from this group is relatively small, so there is no significant prediction for this group
Regression Analysis for Satisfaction towards Church and Participants’ Age
*No group difference
Regression Analysis for Satisfaction towards Church and Participants’ Education Background
*No group difference
Regression Analysis for Satisfaction towards Church and Participants’ Gender
**p<0.05, level of satisfaction is significantly higher
Regression Analysis for Satisfaction towards Church and Participants’ Years of Coming to Christ
*No group difference
Regression Analysis for Satisfaction towards Church and Size of Church Congregation
*p<0.05，participants from Church Congregation with more than 2,000 people have significantly lower level of satisfaction
From the above analysis results, preaching and counselling are two crucial way of church responses. We have done further analysis to interpret the correlation between the frequency of these two responses and the level of satisfaction of participants. The results indicate that among participants from churches who rarely or never preach about the social movement or offer counselling services, those in aged 18-29 and 30-39 have significantly lower level of satisfaction towards their churches.
*p<0.05
**Some participants have not responded to the item so the total numbers are different from the above
*p<0.05
** Some participants have not responded to the item so the total numbers are different from the above
From the two research reports, we can see that participants treasure the pastoral presence, teaching and counselling offered by church. Referring to our earlier research on Dechurched, brothers and sisters who left church also hope to experience love and companionship in church and they miss the in-depth teaching on biblical truth. These two research point us to crucial ministry directions including the importance of sermon messages and the hope for pastoral presence and companionship.