{"id":1103,"date":"2013-03-26T07:00:49","date_gmt":"2013-03-26T12:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thomrainer.wpengine.com?p=1103"},"modified":"2020-02-07T15:45:27","modified_gmt":"2020-02-07T21:45:27","slug":"the-15-largest-protestant-denominations-in-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/the-15-largest-protestant-denominations-in-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"The 15 Largest Protestant Denominations in the United States"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches<\/em><\/a> assembles various data on churches and denominations across North America. I recently gleaned the top 15 denominations by membership in the United States from their reports:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Southern Baptist Convention<\/strong>: 16.2 million members<\/li>\n
  2. The United Methodist Church<\/strong>: 7.8 million members<\/li>\n
  3. The Church of God in Christ<\/strong>: 5.5 million members<\/li>\n
  4. National Baptist Convention<\/strong>: 5.0 million members<\/li>\n
  5. Evangelical Lutheran Church, U.S.A.<\/strong>: 4.5 million members<\/li>\n
  6. National Baptist Convention of America<\/strong>: 3.5 million members<\/li>\n
  7. Assemblies of God<\/strong>: 2.9 million members<\/li>\n
  8. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)<\/strong>: 2.8 million members<\/li>\n
  9. African Methodist Episcopal Church<\/strong>: 2.5 million members<\/li>\n
  10. National Missionary Baptist Convention of America<\/strong>: 2.5 million members<\/li>\n
  11. The Lutheran Church\u2014Missouri Synod (LCMS)<\/strong>: 2.3 million members<\/li>\n
  12. The Episcopal Church<\/strong>: 2.0 million members<\/li>\n
  13. Churches of Christ<\/strong>: 1.6 million members<\/li>\n
  14. Pentecostal Assemblies of the World<\/strong>: 1.5 million members<\/li>\n
  15. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church<\/strong>: 1.4 million members<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Neither the Yearbook list nor this blog infers that bigger is better. To the contrary, I have noted on a number of occasions how church membership, unfortunately, is fast becoming a meaningless number. Only the Assemblies of God on this list reported membership growth from the previous year, and their growth rate was only one-half of one percent.<\/p>\n

    Nevertheless, the numbers are interesting. Does your church belong to one of these denominations? Are you in a non-denominational church? What are your reflections on this list?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches assembles various data on churches and denominations across North America. I recently gleaned the top 15 denominations by membership in the United States from their reports: Southern Baptist Convention: 16.2 million members The United Methodist Church: 7.8 million members The Church of God in Christ: 5.5 million members…","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"publish_to_discourse":"","publish_post_category":"","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"","discourse_permalink":"","wpdc_publishing_response":"","wpdc_publishing_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,186,176],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-answers","category-health-and-metrics","category-revitalize"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe 15 Largest Protestant Denominations in the United States | Church Answers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/the-15-largest-protestant-denominations-in-the-united-states\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The 15 Largest Protestant Denominations in the United States | Church Answers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches assembles various data on churches and denominations across North America. 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