Positive Trends in Barna Survey

The Barna Group is reporting some positive trends, including increased adult Sunday School attendance:

"Church attendance has increased slowly in recent years. While we have not returned to the 49% of adults who attended in a typical week as recorded in 1991, there has been a significant rebound from the 37% recorded in 1996, climbing to 47% in 2006.
Involvement in small groups that meet for Bible study, prayer or personal relationships, other than Sunday school or Christian education classes, has reached a new high in 2006. Currently, nearly one out of every four adults (23%) is engaged in such a gathering during a typical week. A decade ago, one out of every six adults (17%) did so.
Church volunteerism, after experiencing the same mid-Nineties doldrums as most other religious behaviors, has returned to its 1991 level of 27%. Volunteering at a church has been one of the more stable measures during the past 15 years, ranging from a low of 20% to the current high.
Even adult Sunday school attendance has risen in recent years. Once a mainstay of Protestant churches, Sunday school lost its cache in the Nineties, but seems to be on the rebound as evidenced by attendance numbers that reached 24% in this year’s tracking survey. That is up considerably from the 17% mark recorded in 1995 and in 1996. "