‘God Gave Me the Desire to Go Back’: How COVID Renewed Churchgoing for Many

By G. Jeffrey MacDonald

Kathy Nichols of Hebron, Wisconsin was a regular churchgoing person for most of her life until 2004. Then at age 50, she stopped going. Her life was packed: working as a janitor on the 2-to-10 p.m. shift, caring for her grandson by day and not sleeping well. Sunday mornings became her time for getting organized at home.

“I just didn’t have the desire to go” to church, recalled Nichols, now 71 and retired.

Doing nightly devotions on her own kept her feeling close to God.

But her yearning for church came roaring back during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Feeling isolated in rural Wisconsin, she craved to reconnect at Hebron Community Church, where she’d been an active member. Knowing she couldn’t go to church amidst public health restrictions made her want to go even more, she said.

“I was like, ‘I’m missing fellowship, I’m missing talking to people, I’m missing people praying for you when you need it’,” Nichols said. “I just think that God gave me the desire to go back.”

Now Nichols attends worship weekly and stays for potluck lunch afterwards. The habit has made her family’s life better, she said. She’s appreciated receiving prayers and other support when two family members suffered heart attacks, she said. She also switched hospitals based on things she’d heard at church. Now her husband, Charles, is receiving better medical care, she said.

Nichols is not alone. As congregations absorb a swell of new attendees in the years after COVID, they’re not just getting folks who switched from another church. They’re getting people whose pandemic experiences led them to rekindle church ties, or engage for the first time, as they strive to tap into and sustain what they sorely missed during those difficult days.  

Survey data suggest those formerly “not interested” have been roused. Twenty-two percent of newcomers in church returned after years of noninvolvement, according to a 2024 Hartford Institute of Religion Research survey of more than 24,000 churchgoers across America. Another 8% are converts participating in congregational life for the first time.

“The returners are more likely to have increased their volunteering and have a strong desire for belonging,” said Dr. Charissa Mikoski, assistant professor of Research at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, on a June webinar. The survey is part of the Hartford Institute’s five-year project: Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations (EPIC).

Those seeking connection have often found it in small congregations, Mikoski said.

“When you’re a small-knit group where everyone knows everyone, it’s a lot easier to stay in contact and maybe do a phone tree kind of thing and make sure that everyone is covered,” Mikoski said.

Congregations are feeling the trends. Example: Trinity Episcopal Church in Melrose, Massachusetts, has seen its membership double over the past two years from 86 to 170, according to Priest-in-Charge Isaac Martinez.  

Part of that growth traces to church switching, including some who migrated to Trinity after their nearby Episcopal congregation closed in 2023. But 59 of the 84 new members were either unchurched or long-term inactive prior to joining Trinity, Martinez said in an email.

“They are primarily looking for community after the devastating isolation of the pandemic – I would say that is the #1 cause,” Martinez said. “A close second, particularly for families with kids and teens at home, is that they are looking for how to build a moral foundation for their children.”

Among Trinity’s newcomers is the family of Matthew and Mindy Abbott, a professional couple residing in Melrose. Raised Roman Catholic (Matthew) and Episcopalian (Mindy), they’d long been planning to make churchgoing a part of their life with children (ages 6 and 7) but hadn’t yet gotten to it before the pandemic shuttered every church they’d considered.

As COVID restrictions eased, attending Trinity helped the Abbotts feel more connected to their town and neighbors.

“People came up, introduced themselves and asked about us,” Matthew Abbott said. “As we went back again and again [to Trinity], we started to feel the positive impact of meeting these people, people of all ages, who we wouldn’t have met otherwise.”

Worship has also had the benefit of putting wild world events in an uplifting broader context for the Abbott family.

“Having that time to sit, worship, think and take time away from the madness of everything else that’s going around definitely helps our mindsets,” Abbott said. “It helps our relationship. It helps our outlook. I always find myself leaving the service with a very positive feeling.”

What drew the Abbotts to Trinity echoes broader survey findings. For instance, a welcoming atmosphere and worship experience emerged in the survey as leading factors for people who’d long been away from church life. Returners also said they value when a congregation is well-aligned with their personal values and beliefs.

Whatever the driving factors might be for individuals who’ve re-engaged, the theme of pandemic experiences never seems to be far away.

Consider Emma Pampanin, a 35-year-old single mother who teaches high school English in East Boston. She was raised Roman Catholic, but in her social circles of similarly aged people, most don’t practice a religious faith. Even after an experience in Central America, where she worked for a time in her 20s and witnessed the positive impact of Catholicism on children, she still wasn’t active in a parish in her 20s.

But when her son was born during the pandemic in September 2020, she had no doubt she wanted to have him baptized and begin taking part in parish life.   

“If you had told 18- or 22-year-old me that I would be feeling this strongly about putting him in these spaces [where Catholic faith is practiced and taught], I think she would have been a little surprised,” Pampanin said.

Compelling factors were several. As a single mom, she said, she was “drawn to an institution that could help in raising my son.”

The pandemic’s cultural effect on group identity consciousness also got her thinking more about what she wanted to claim for herself and her son.  

 It’s “a world that can be very obsessed with identity,” said Pampanin, noting that her son attends a diverse Catholic school where religious beliefs and practices create a common identity. “As opposed to identifying based on socio-economic factors or racial factors, it feels more natural to find identifying spaces under a belief system. That feels more real.”

Pampanin has been inspired by another pandemic trend: proliferation of spiritual content creators. Podcasts took off when people had extra time for recording and listening to them. She got hooked and hasn’t looked back.

“There’s such a presence of Catholic creators in the podcast and YouTube spaces that lot of people are getting reengaged that way – people my age and younger,” Pampanin said. What she hears, for instance, on “Bible in a Year” or “Pints with Aquinas” get her thinking more intentionally about how she want to live her faith, including in parish contexts.

 eing part of parish life, though, doesn’t have to mean just one. EPIC found that 46% of American churchgoers regularly attend or view other church services beyond their primary one. Seven percent say they have more than one “home” church.

Pampanin can relate. She plans to pick one parish to join in the near future, she said, but for now she’s happy having three where she and her son feel known and welcomed. One is near their suburban home; another is near her son’s school. Each has distinctly endearing features.

 “I see it as a positive that he can explore different faith communities,” Pampanin said.