If plenty of people now come to church some Sundays and stream the rest, is that still church, or just a weaker version of it? Rev. Dr. Brianna Parker, CEO of Black Millennial Cafe and lead researcher for Barna’s State of the Black Church study, expects many people to treat church less like a fixed weekly address and more like a trip to the movies: something they attend when the experience feels worth the effort. If she is right, the question that matters most is no longer how full the room looks. It is whether a church can find, care for and disciple the people who are not in the room.
Parker’s read is neither nostalgic nor alarmed. She thinks the Black church has real reasons for hope. She also thinks most churches were organized around a habit that is weakening, and that the weakness was there before anyone closed a building.
What does Parker mean by the AMC church?
Her prediction is simple. Once people could worship from home, home became the baseline and the building became the special occasion.
People will treat it like a movie theater experience. Like I could do it at home, but, you know, for the experience when it’s worth it, you know, I take my whole family.
Her reasons are ordinary ones. She expected an early rush back, because people were eager to go anywhere at all. Then the costs return. People are “gonna remember the convenience of virtual ministry, and then they’re gonna wonder why they’re wasting gas.” Add the dry cleaning bill, children who need both weekend days to rest, and rooms that suddenly feel crowded. Add, too, a workweek spent on video calls that makes a streamed service feel like one more meeting, and youth games scheduled for Sunday morning that leave parents choosing between the pew and the field.
Notice what kind of claim this is. Parker is not saying occasional attendance is good. She is describing what she expects people to do, the way a forecaster describes weather. Still, the image changes what a pastor can assume. A movie theater does not count on you. It has to give you a reason to come. Her sharpest line on this is a warning: “for those people who do special Sundays, they’re gonna get special visitors.”
It is also fair to say how far this evidence reaches. The forecast came about a year into the pandemic, before anyone knew how reopening would actually go, and the attendance patterns behind it come partly from one client congregation’s poll. That is a trained researcher’s informed reading, not a measured national result, and it should be held that way.
Who is staying home, and why?
The easy assumption is that the people watching online are the people drifting away. Parker’s data complicates that. In the poll she ran for that client congregation, the seniors loved virtual worship and the young adults did not like it at all. The young adults stayed connected because they still believed in their church, but they were not happy doing it that way.
So why would the oldest members be the happiest with a screen? Because it gave them something church had not. Online, they could comment and take part in ways they had not before. And “when they can’t drive at night, they still get to go to revival.” Also: “When they’re sick, they still get to go to worship.” Streaming did not create a new need. It met an old one that churches had not been meeting, which means some of the people at home were never really being reached in person either.
With younger adults, the assumption runs the other way. When church leaders hear that millennials want to come back, they hear renewed commitment. Parker’s response was blunt: “No, they don’t. They wanna leave a house.” Wanting to get out is not the same as wanting a weekly obligation. Viewing habits had already loosened too. Parker described people watching several services in a day, and offered her own pattern: “I watch it later during the week, when I feel like I need it in a different moment.”
What draws younger adults, then? Not a better broadcast. “I think if the church is able to create opportunities for fellowship engagement, you know, that type of situation, then black millennials are encouraged by it.” The opposite is passive viewing: “But just sitting there watching you, I mean, that’s, that ain’t it.” The real line falls between a church people watch and a church people take part in. A camera can serve the second. It cannot replace it.
Was the building holding people together?
This is the part of Parker’s argument that should unsettle anyone who thinks the main job is getting people back into seats. The closures did not just reduce attendance. They revealed that many churches had no way of keeping track of their people apart from attendance.
“But I realize discipleship is the issue now,” she said, explaining why her firm had started training churches in it. The reason was stark: “most people don’t even know where their members are.” Then the line that names the real test: “Pastoral care is like not a thing if you’re not willing to beat down the door, you know? And that’s not pastoral care.” If care only reaches the person willing to force the issue, it is not care.
Think about what Sunday attendance had been doing quietly. It kept people visible. A church that counts heads can feel healthy for years without knowing who is struggling, who has moved, or who has slipped away. Remove the gathering and the gaps show up. Budgets often tell the same story. Parker pointed to congregations that still treat processing membership forms as a full-time job but have no full-time paid person in media, a staffing plan built around people walking in rather than people who need to be reached.
She did not think churches had done badly overall. By her reading of Barna’s comparison data, Black churches moved online quickly, partly out of necessity, since giving had to continue and people needed to see that ministry was still happening. Her worry was that speed in moving the service had not become depth in discipling people. “Unfortunately, I think we’re coasting and we’re waiting for the day that this is over,” she said. “I just think it’s time for us to kick it up a notch.”
Doesn’t the Bible tell Christians not to stop gathering?
This is the strongest objection to the whole conversation, and it deserves a straight answer. Hebrews 10:25 says, “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” If people are drifting into occasional attendance, isn’t the answer simply to call them back, rather than redesign the church around their absence?
Part of the answer is that Parker is not arguing against gathering. Her case is that the gathering should be worth showing up for, and that empty seats are a pastoral problem, not a new normal to celebrate.
The other part comes from reading Hebrews closely. The verse does not just say to assemble. It says why: so believers can be “exhorting one another.” The writer has people in view who were already pulling away, and the remedy is people encouraging each other, not only a service being held. A church that does not know where its members are cannot do that for the ones who stopped coming. Calling people back is right. But who does the calling, if no one knows who is gone?
The picture of the earliest church in Acts points the same way. Acts 2:42 says, “And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.” A few verses later, Acts 2:46 describes them “continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house.” This is narrative, describing what that community did, not a command fixing how every church must be structured. But it shows teaching, shared life, meals and prayer happening in a public meeting place and in homes. The church’s life was never confined to one room at one hour.
Scripture’s instruction to leaders also assumes they know their people. Peter tells elders to “Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof” (1 Peter 5:2). Oversight of a flock you cannot locate is not oversight. That is Parker’s point, put in older language.
What does that change for the people who do return?
Knowing your people also changes what reopening means. Parker asked churches to plan for grief, not just logistics.
they have to acknowledge the loss that the person who usually sits on the row in front of them does not exist. And maybe half the row is gone.
She added that “the trauma of walking into worship and seeing a new version of it is something we need to consider.” That grief falls on everyone in the room, including people who never stopped coming. A church that rushes back to normal without naming who is missing teaches its people that the missing did not count. A half-empty room left as it is soon “becomes cold, you know, and it’s no longer intimate.” And a pastor who reads a small crowd as personal rejection will be tempted to chase numbers, where one who reads it as information starts asking where everyone else is.
The same logic applies to money. Some churches with low overhead and steady giving were in better shape than before and were holding the money rather than investing in people. The fears were real: public policy, taxes, whether members would keep their jobs. Yet Parker’s point was that waiting had become the default. “They’re holding on for a bad day,” she said, saving for a rainy day when “it’s already raining, you know, it’s just sprinkling, you know, it’s not storming yet.” What she said was missing is a theology of sufficiency, the conviction that what God has provided is enough to act on now.
So what does church look like now?
It looks like a church that has stopped treating the attendee as its basic unit and started treating the known person that way. An attendee is someone who happened to be in the room. A known person is someone the church can name, locate and reach this week whether they came or not. A full room can hide neglect. A church that knows who is missing from the row, and has already called them, is doing what the assembling was always for.
Parker’s own conclusion was hopeful, and she grounded it in her work rather than sentiment. “The data is showing me that we have every reason to still believe in the black church,” she said. The church “may be in distress, right?” But “certainly not dying and not dead.” Distress is a reason to work. The work is to know the people who belong to the church, wherever they happen to be on Sunday.