Most Churches Aren’t Growing: What We Can Learn From Those That Are
(ANALYSIS) I’ve been around churches my entire life — specifically evangelical ones.
There’s a certain kind of conversation that happens among pastors and denominational leaders, usually in almost hushed tones: “Did you hear about how [insert church name] added a thousand new attendees last year?”
Someone will inevitably chime in with another example of a church experiencing rapid growth. Before long, the discussion circles back to the same question: “How in the world do they do that?”
For most pastors, leading a church through that kind of explosive growth will never happen. A good year might mean adding ten or fifteen new members. More often, the reality is stagnation — or even a slight decline. And there’s a good reason for that: most churches just aren’t that big. The FACT study (PDF) found that about 70% of congregations have fewer than 100 people in regular attendance. The National Congregations Study concluded that the average church has just 70 active members.
So when we hear about a church adding a thousand new members, it’s so rare it almost sounds impossible.
For the last decade, Outreach Magazine has published a list of the “fastest-growing churches in America.” They gather this data by contacting thousands of churches via email, asking them to report two numbers: their average attendance in February/March of the previous year and their current average attendance. Outreach then runs calculations and spot checks to confirm the numbers are accurate before publishing the Outreach 100 list.
They’ve been doing this since 2015. I wrote a script to scrape all that data from their website and organize it into a clean, well-structured spreadsheet.
With that in hand, I could dig deeper into these outlier churches — the ones experiencing truly extraordinary growth.
You can read the rest of Ryan Burge’s 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.