The following stats on church in American are culled from The American Church Research Project, which is endorsed by the Lausanne Movement and led by David T. Olson.
- According to George Barna, 47% of American adults attended church on a typical weekend in 2005. This is not accurate. Only 17% of the US population attended an orthodox Christian church in 2007. Nine percent of that is evangelical church attendance. The rest is Roman Catholic and Mainline attendance. Of course, church attendance does not account for all believers, but these figures are staggering nonetheless.
- While the US population has increased, church attendance has remained the same, resulting in a net loss of church attendees. Numbers from actual counts of people in orthodox Christian churches show that 20.4% of the population attended church on any given weekend in 1990. That percentage dropped to 18.7% in 2000, and to 17.0% in 2007.
- Evangelical church growth slowed down significantly in the last year – from an average growth throughout this decade of 0.8%, to a gain of only 0.3% in the last year.
- More Catholics and Mainliner are switching to Evangelical churches than vice versa, meaning that Evangelical growth through the conversion of the unchurched is limited.
- The church plant rate declined until 1937, then grew until it had doubled by 1957. Then it entered a period of steep decline from 1957-1970, reaching the lowest point in history. Since then it has increased marginally. Many, many more churches need to be planted in the U.S, just to keep up with population growth. These statistics also show that the strongest ratio of church attendance is in the South. Two thousand five hundred additional new churches are needed per year to keep up with population growth.
For more info go to www.theamericanchurch.org or download this presentation.