If you’ve been around the Christian Church as whole for a while, you know that membership is often a statistic used to measure the size of a church. GLC’s current membership is 1073. In recent years, the ELCA (our denomination) has worked to reflect a more important number- engagement. Engagement is how many people regularly engage with the ministries of the congregation. This number is hard to calculate! The closest tangible measure we have is Average Weekly Worship Attendance (AWWA). There are separate numbers for in person and online attendance. Our AWWA is 335 in person and 150 online (calculated using a formula provided by the ELCA). You will find A LOT of churches with a higher membership number than GLC, but only one other congregation in the Metro Chicago Synod has a larger in person AWWA than GLC. It is not a competition- it is an opportunity to celebrate the unique energy and growth of GLC. Where can you find this data? Go to ELCA.org and click on “Find a Church”. When you put in our zip code, your explorations will begin! – Pastor Trudy Stoffel
