What Can We Learn From The 100 Largest United Methodist Churches?
(ANALYSIS) Whenever you think about the very largest churches in the United States, what denominations come to mind? I think that most of you, if you’ve been following along with this newsletter for any amount of time, would think of non-denominationalism. Maybe a Southern Baptist church. And the data says that this is largely the case.
I’ve written about the Outreach 100 list before – it’s the best dataset of the largest churches in the United States. Among those, half describe themselves as non-denominational, 15% are Southern Baptist, and 20% ID as independent Christian or “other Baptist.” The Assemblies of God has about 5% of churches on the list, but the next in line are the Methodists at just 1.8%.
Yeah, there’s just not a whole lot of discussion of really big United Methodist Churches for a very good reason – there aren’t that many of them. But that gives me even more motivation to study this subset of American Christianity.
Thankfully, the United Methodists have an easily accessible table listed on their website with the title “Largest 100 Churches by Membership.” I wanted to use this list because it offers a glimpse into a problem that plagues a lot of churches, especially in the mainline: their membership rolls are bloated with folks who haven’t attended a service in decades.
I’m going to explore that in just a minute, but let me start by just showing the 25 largest UMC congregations in terms of total membership.
The very largest United Methodist Church in terms of membership is in Dallas, Texas — it’s Highland Park. They report a total membership of just over 15,000 folks.
Next in line is a church that you all might be hearing about quite a bit more in the months to come: Resurrection Church in Leawood, Kansas. The reason for that is that their senior pastor is Adam Hamilton, who is running for the United States Senate in Kansas. Their church’s membership boasts 13,419 members.
There are a total of four churches that have at least 10,000 on their membership file but most of these churches on the list are in the 5,000-7,000 range in terms of membership. I also color coded these churches based on their current jurisdiction.
The United Methodists love their bureaucracy and there are multiple layers of organization in the UMC. There are five total jurisdictions in the United States and you can see that South Central shows up quite a bit on this graph.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.