Thursday, 14 September 2017

How Many Churches Does America Have? More Than Expected

Best estimate yet of US congregations finds rise of the ‘nons’ has more impact than rise of the ‘nones.’

An estimated 30,000 congregations shut their doors in the United States from 2006 to 2012. Yet a recent study finds good news for churches overall—including the lowest closure rate of any American institution.

According to a recent paper published by sociologist Simon Brauer in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the number of religious congregations in the United States has increased by almost 50,000 since 1998. A key reason: growth in nondenominational churches.

Using the National Congregations Study (NCS) conducted in 2006 and 2012, he estimates the number of congregations in the US increased from 336,000 in 1998 to a peak of 414,000 in 2006, but then leveled off at 384,000 in 2012.

Brauer’s estimate is more reliable—statistically speaking—than previous estimates that used other methodology; however, his model “relies on samples of individuals and not the organizations themselves,” so there is still a range of variation around the “best bets,” he told CT. Thus, the loss of 30,000 churches is not statistically significant (as it falls within the model’s confidence interval of 95%).

Meanwhile, nondenominational churches kept growing: from 54,000 in 1998, to 79,000 in 2006, to 84,000 in 2012. This echoes a 2010 report from the Hartford Institute for Religious Research (HIRR) which found that nondenominational churches have the third-largest cluster of adherents in the United States (following Catholics and Southern Baptists). HIRR found that individuals claiming nondenominational affiliation grew from 194,000 in 1990 to 8 million in 2008.

The growing number of non-Christian places of worship is another reason for the increase, said Brauer. While such congregations ...

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