Serving the Christian Market Since 1968

14732 Middle Point Road Van Wert, Ohio 45891 - 419.238.4082

The Foster Letter —

Religious Market Update

The FOSTER Letter is a bi-weekly e-mail religious market intelligence report targeted to Christian market channel and ministry leaders.  Each issue reports on news, trends, events and research that will directly or indirectly impact your audiences and businesses in a convenient summary format  Better informed leaders make better choices!

Researched, Edited & Published by Gary D. Foster

Excerpts from the

March 10, 2010 edition of

The FOSTER Letter—Religious Market Update

24/7 Pushback As the social networking train gathers momentum, some riders are getting off. Their reasons run from being besieged by online “Friends” who aren’t really friends to lingering concerns over where their messages and photos might materialize. If there’s a common theme to their exodus, it’s the nagging sense that a time-sucking habit was taking the “real” out of life. Facebook says it provides the ability for users to deactivate their account or delete it completely, but it is labor-intense to trim or scale down one’s Friend list. But tens of thousands of dropouts represent a fallen leaf in the forest of social networkers happily updating their status/thoughts/whereabouts at this very moment. According to The Nielsen Co, Facebook drew more than 110 million unique visitors in the U.S. in December; double its ’08 numbers. (USA Today 2/10/10)

Moms are Aware of technology's negatives, and they’re taking steps to minimize them. As technology becomes more ingrained in their daily lives, moms worry about downsides like less physical activity, lack of face-to-face contact and shorter attention spans. However, moms are taking steps to mitigate these risks by making sure their families enjoy time together uninterrupted by technology (78%), setting limits (75%), using parental controls (41%) and taking away devices (37%). (Engage Moms 1/20/10)  

Aging Anglicans The average age of Anglican churchgoers is 61, according to according to a Church of England study. The report found half of those in the pews are pensioners. Some rural congregations averaged over age 65 while the youngest were found in London, with an average age of 54. The overall average age of England’s churchgoing population is just 48. Weekly church attendance continues to fall with around 1.14M people going to a church service at least once a week in ’08, but average Sunday attendance was down to 960,000 from 978,000 in ’07. There were also slightly fewer infant baptisms, confirmations, marriages and funerals. Surprisingly, the number of children and young people at weekly services did rise by 3% in ’08 to 225,000. (Telegraph, UK 1/22/10) 

The Ultimate Innovations happen when you step outside your comfort zone, act on the ideas that you think will work, and stop accepting doom and gloom prognostications from your peers. I can help you gain that outside perspective. Call or e-mail me at 419-238-4082, Gary@garydfoster.com or www.garydfoster.com. (Hannah Johnson, Deputy Publisher of Publishing Perspectives 2/26/10) 

Tithing Stable Despite the economic turmoil, tithing has remained relatively stable. Overall, 7% of all adults reported donation levels equaling at least 10% of their income, finds Barna Group research. This is comparable to the figure prior to the economic downturn. Tithing levels to both churches and other charities were highest among evangelicals (24% give at least 10%), non-mainline Protestants (13%), churchgoers (11%) and non-evangelical born-again Christians (10%). Those over age 45 (9%) were nearly twice as likely as those younger (5%) to tithe. Income level is not a factor: Just 9% of upscale adults gave at least 10%, while 11% of the downscale set gave the same proportion. (Barna.org 2/8/10) 

Average Book Sales are shockingly small and falling fast. In ’04, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000. The average book in America sells about 500 copies (Publishers Weekly, 1/17/06). And average sales have since fallen much more. According to BookScan, only 299 million books were sold in ’08 in the U.S. in all adult nonfiction categories combined. The average U.S. book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 over its lifetime. A book today has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore. (The Change Revolution 2/10) 

The National Council of Churches’ 2010 Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches reports membership gains in the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Assemblies of God, among others. The78^th annual edition of the Yearbook also reports a continuing membership decline in virtually all mainline denominations. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s second largest denomination, reported a decline for the second year in a row, down 0.24%. The Catholic Church, the nation’s largest, also reported a slight membership loss in ’09, but rebounded this year with a robust growth of 1.49%. The Latter-day Saints grew 1.71%, and the Assemblies of God grew 1.27%. Churches reporting the highest losses were the Presbyterian Church (USA), down 3.28%; American Baptist Churches, down 2%; and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, down 1.92%. (National Council of Churches 2/12/10).

Poor Customer Service Costs Genesys, in measuring the cost of poor customer service, found enterprises in the U.S. lose an estimated $83 billion each year due to defections and abandoned purchases as a direct result of a poor experience. Nearly two-thirds of consumers said they have ended a relationship due to customer service alone. Survey participants said when they end a relationship, 61% of the time they take their business to a competitor. (Center for Media Research Brief 2/18/10) 

Interim Executive staff turnover happens¾and it’s rarely at the ideal time. Let me help you through those transition times. Let me be your interim executive to insure against costly workflow disruption. Contact 419-238-4082, Gary@garydfoster.com or www.garydfoster.com. 

Too Much Pressure According to a new survey from Seventeen magazine and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 78% of teenage boys feel there is “way too much pressure from society” to have sex. (Church Report 2/8/10) 

Global Mission Trends Leadership Network’s Eric Swanson has identified Eight Trends That Will Shape the Future of Global Missions. They are: 1) Mutuality—The future of missions will be shaped by mutuality between East and West, North and South, sending and receiving nations. Churches worldwide are learning to come together. 2) Partnering—Different than mutuality, partnering pertains to projects that require the assistance of skilled co-laborers driven by what indigenous leaders in the country are trying to accomplish. 3) Investing in leaders—Leadership is everything. Wherever good things are happening, a capable and passionate man or woman will be leading the way. 4) Combining good deeds and good news—The level of problem-solving in which externally focused, missional churches are engaged is significantly higher. 5) Greater financial accountability—With all the needs and opportunities in the world, global missions leaders of the future are working to maximize every dollar expended on global outreach. 6) Business as mission—An emerging funding model ties business and mission together. Missional entrepreneurs who are starting businesses and creating jobs in the countries in which they serve. 7) Focus—Churches today are learning to do better by focusing on fewer places of engagement. 8) Technology—With every breakthrough in communication technology, there have been innovators who have exploited that technology to advance the gospel. (Leadership Network Advance 2/23/10) 

Leverage Your Current Assets Transformation is different than starting anew, so use your assets, such as current products, services, customer relationships, a terrific team. You can start ahead of the competition. I’m here to help. Contact 419-238-4082, Gary@garydfoster.com or www.garydfoster.com. (USA Today 2/26/10) 

Millennials Aren’t Rushing to the Altar Just 21% are married now, half the percentage of their parents’ generation at the same stage of life. 34% are parents, according to the Pew Research survey. Pew estimates that in ’06, more than a third of 18- to 29-year-old U.S. women who gave birth were unmarried, far more than in their parents’ generation. (The Pew Forum Weekly Update 2/25/10) 

Journalism @ Risk Based on records kept by the U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Labor and tallies by various newspaper industry watchers, total employment in the newspaper publishing business has declined from 414,000 in ’01 to 309,000 at the end of ’09, a 25.4% drop in 8 years. This leads many to fear the quality and quantity of journalism will suffer noticeably. (Media Daily News 2/23/10) 

Casino Attendance Declines According to new Mintel study, 30% of U.S. adults said they visited a casino in the past year, and attendance has been declining steadily since ’01, when 35% of adults went to the casinos. The steady decline suggests the recession is causing people to stay away. (Marketing Daily 12/24/10) 

Most Would Remarry Their Spouse In a new CBS News poll, 90% of married Americans said they would marry their spouse again, a percentage barely changed since ’95 (93%). 95% of men said they would marry their wives again vs. 85% of women. When asked to pick what is most important in a successful relationship, 49% picked “Respect,” followed by “Trust” (37%) and a “Sense of humor” (10%). “Sex” was picked by 2% and “Money” by 0%. (CBSNews.com)

Brand Trust According to a new Millward Brown study, Amazon.com is the top-performing brand in the U.S. based on 2 key branding criteria: trust and recommendations. Following Amazon were FedEx, Downey, Huggies and Tide. The study suggests consumers are especially reluctant to spend money on brands they don’t trust in a tough economy. In fact, the study found the #1 trusted brand in each of the 22 countries studied was nearly 7 times more likely to be purchased, and consumers were 10 times more likely to have formed a strong bond with those brands. (Marketing Daily 2/23/10) 

Prefer Their Pet In a global survey, 21% said they would rather spend the day with a pet than with their spouse or partner. In the U.S., 27% said the same. (Reuters/Ipsos) 

Where Have All the Protestants Gone? As recently as the 1950s, the President as well as 7 of the 9 of the Supreme Court Justices were mainline Protestant Christians. They called many of the shots on civil rights, school prayer, immigration, education and other key issues of the day. In the late ’60s, their numbers began to dwindle. Now, only 1 member of the high court is Protestant, and President Obama very rarely attends church. Today a quarter or more of mainline congregants are 65 or older, 3 times the number conservative evangelicals. So how did America’s most influential religious group become so marginal? The conventional wisdom has been that the more conservative Catholic and evangelical churches simply won over the hearts and minds of the American people. In the fall issue of the Yale divinity journal Reflections, the Rev. John Lindner says, “By valuing the individual quest for faith, Protestant practice has resulted in a drift toward the self-authentication of truth, suspicion of ecclesiastical authority, and an outbreak of freelance spirituality, launching generations of seekers.” This has helped fuel the increase in New Age movements as well as in the number of Americans who refer to themselves as spiritual but not religious. Denominational labels and loyalty mean little to such people. (USA Today 3/1/10) 

For information on how to become a subscriber to the entire 3-4 page Foster Letter---Religious Market Update, E-mail us at: subscribe@garydfoster.com