Are most denominations in America in decline?
That was a question I considered nearly a decade ago. At the time, the answer was that conservative churches weren’t growing as quickly as they once were, while mainline churches were on a path toward extinction. But a lot has changed since then. And not for the better.
Before we consider the question in detail, we should clarify what’s meant by “decline.” In 2015, I considered the year-to-year trends since the 1960s. The data showed there was a decline in the total number of people in all but a handful of (mostly conservative) denominations. That isn’t surprising, since fewer Americans are identifying as Christian. As Pew Research points out, as recently as the early 1990s, about 90 percent of U.S. adults identified as Christians. Today, only about two-thirds of adults are Christians.
But looking at total numbers obscures that the population has increased considerably since the 1960s. A better approach would be to ask, as Ryan Burge recently did, how large denominations would be if they managed to grow at the same rate as the general population of the United States.
Worse Decline Than We Think
Burge looked at the percentage change in membership between 1987 and 2021 for nine denominations. Six are in the mainline tradition: American Baptist Churches, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church. Three are in the evangelical tradition: the Assemblies of God (AoG), the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA).
How large would denominations be if they managed to grow at the same rate as the general population of the United States?
Out of those nine, only two increased in members. The AoG grew by over 50 percent in the 35 years, while the PCA doubled in size. But as Burge notes, the AoG growth rate has dropped down near 0 percent a year, and the PCA remains small (about 400,000 members).
Yet the decline becomes more apparent when we consider what their size would be if they’d merely kept up with natural population growth. For example, the SBC has about 7 million “missing” members.
“If these nine denominations would have grown as fast as the population from 1990 through 2022, they would have about 53 million members today. That’s about 16% of the overall population of the country,” says Burge. “Instead, they have a membership of 30.8 million people. That’s a total gap of just over 21 million members that don’t exist today. Those 30.8 million folks are just 9.3% of the total population. So, just these nine denominations are just slightly more than half the size they should be if they continued to grow with America.”
Do We Even Have Enough Churches?
The failure of conservative denominations to keep up with population growth is disconcerting. But a question we often fail to ask is this: If they wanted to come, do we even have enough churches to serve the population?
The answer depends, of course, on where people live. The population not only grows every year but also shifts around the country. For instance, the Census Bureau found that in 2020–21, growth slowed in the nation’s biggest cities while some states experienced an uptick in population due to migration to the South and West. Of the top 15 fastest-growing cities, five were in Arizona, three were in Texas, three were in Florida, three were in Idaho, and one was in Tennessee. Are there enough churches for the people moving to those areas?
Burge recently looked at data on religious congregations from the Religion Census and discovered there’s an overabundance of churches in parts of the U.S. that have seen population decline or stagnation, while in places where the population has increased, there aren’t enough churches.
There’s an overabundance of churches in parts of the U.S. that have seen population decline or stagnation, while in places where population has increased, there aren’t enough churches.
The most churched state in the U.S., says Burge, is Arkansas. There’s a house of worship for every 407 people who live in the state. Other states with a low ratio are Alabama, Mississippi, South Dakota, and West Virginia.
The fastest-growing states, though, have relatively high ratios. Idaho has 750 people per church, Texas has 993, and Florida has 1245. The highest ratios were in Nevada (2,042 per church) and California (1,665 per church).
The counties with fast growth aren’t seeing houses of worship opening at the same rate, says Burge:
For [every] one percentage increase in population, the ratio of people to churches also raises by about half a percentage point. Which means that houses of worship would have to open at double the rate that they are currently reporting in order to keep that ratio stable over time.
I don’t know what the right ratio of people to houses of worship is, but I have to believe that 800 is probably too high. I don’t know the capacity of the average house of worship, but I’ve been in a bunch of churches in my life and very few could easily accommodate that many folks.
Think of it this way—if one quarter of a county wanted to attend a religious service locally, would there be capacity for that? If the ratio in a county is 1000 people per congregation that means each church would need a capacity of 250. That’s probably not true of many smaller churches in the United States.
Who Will Go to Nevada?
Jesus told us to “pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” (Matt. 9:38). In the U.S., the laborers we seem to need most are church planters.
Unfortunately, many of our denominations are declining at a time when their resources and institutional knowledge are most needed. Nondenominational churches and cross-denominational church planting networks are starting to fill the gap, but much more is needed. We need to train up thousands of biblically sound leaders. We need pastors who are missionally minded and able to think creatively about how to reach the increasingly unreached American population.
When the Lord says, “Who will go to Pahrump, Nevada?” we need faithful men who will answer, “Send me.”
The Gospel Coalition