Why go to church regularly?
According to the Pew Research Centre Surveys, 2008 to 2017, about 89 per cent of Christians in Ghana attest to the fact that religion is an important component of their lives, as compared to Christians in Israel (58%) and Nigeria (82%).
Interestingly, Ethiopia, Honduras and Philippines appeared to top with 98 per cent, 94 per cent and 91 per cent, respectively.
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Statistics, church attendance
According to religioustolerance.org, based on 1990-1991 data, the country with the highest rate of church attendance in the world was Nigeria (89%) and with the lowest — the Soviet Union (2%).
Ghana was also featured to have 83 per cent of church attendance by the same organisation.
Studies on just going to Church benefits:
Decreased risk, depression
In 2013, a study conducted by Balbuena et al, the Canadian National Population Health Survey happened to be one of the biggest studies ever done on the impact of church going on depression and examined thousands of adults over 14 years (1994-2008).
The study found that people who attended church monthly or more often had a 22 per cent lower risk for serious depression than those who didn’t attend.
This data is in agreement with the American teenagers’ study. The Vedantam report, (2019) from the University of North Carolina examined the effects of church attendance on depression in adolescents aged 13 to 18.
They found that kids who attended church once a week had a 20 per cent lower risk for moderate-to-severe depression in comparison to young people who didn’t attend church at all.
Interestingly, these researchers also studied the effects of religious feelings in general, by examining if non-church-going kids who had many religious classmates were less likely to be depressed than those who had fewer.
The study found that those kids were less prone to depression; this means that non-church-going kids who surround themselves with Christian or church-going kids alone have a positive impact on them.
Enhanced sleep
In a more recent 2018 study conducted by Terrence et al., sponsored by the National Sleep Foundation, a connection between church attendance and high-quality sleep was found.
The study noted: “More religious adults, in particular, tend to exhibit healthier sleep outcomes than their less religious counterparts.”
They further stated: “Religious involvement may be associated with healthier sleep outcomes by limiting mental, chemical and physiological arousal associated with psychological distress, substance use, stress exposure, and allostatic load (the combined physical effects of chronic stress)”.
Further, a 2019 study conducted by Ellison et al., in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion discussed data collected from a 2017 Baylor University survey that asked 1,410 people to comment on their sleep patterns and religious histories.
The study found that people who went to church regularly slept longer, fell asleep more easily and awoke feeling more rested in the morning.
Improved quality of life
The CNN reports that results released in 2016 from the National Nurses’ Health Study in the United States revealed some intriguing data about nurses who go to church. Over 75,000 middle-aged female nurses filled out a survey that included information about how often they had attended church between 1992 and 2012.
This study showed that nurses who went to church more than once a week were 33 per cent less likely to die during that 20-year study period than women who didn’t attend church at all.
For women who went to church once a week, the advantage was 26 per cent.
The most intriguing is a 2017 Vanderbilt University study which found that middle-aged men and women (ages 40 to 65) who attended church regularly had a 55 per cent lower risk of dying in any given year.
They also encountered significantly fewer bad health effects associated with exposure to chronic stress (such as heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and so on). This research project created some impressive admissions from interview subjects about why people go to church that help explain the health benefits.
A study by Bruce et al., (2017) indicated that regular church attendance could reduce blood pressure, improve interpersonal relationships and lower suicide rates, among the long list of possible benefits.
In-Person, Online
In my extensive review of empirical literature, I found that the health benefits measured in these various studies were all derived from in-person church attendance, which raises an interesting question:
Can people who attend church exclusively online enjoy the same kind of benefits in this COVID-19 era?
Since online attendance is a relatively new concept, more research will need to be done to answer this question.
But it seems unlikely the health benefits would be as great since the social aspect of church attendance is largely lost when people attend church virtually.