{"id":826798,"date":"2024-04-25T05:00:06","date_gmt":"2024-04-25T10:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/?p=826798"},"modified":"2024-05-25T07:15:18","modified_gmt":"2024-05-25T12:15:18","slug":"how-much-of-church-growth-is-based-on-demographics-the-data-provides-a-compelling-and-clear-answer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/how-much-of-church-growth-is-based-on-demographics-the-data-provides-a-compelling-and-clear-answer\/","title":{"rendered":"How Much of Church Growth Is Based on Demographics? The Data Provides a Compelling and Clear Answer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-preview\"><p>What must happen for my church to grow? Many pastors and church leaders ask this question. Whether a church grows its attendance or not is top of mind for any casual observer of American religion. Obviously, some of what drives these dynamics are unmeasurable\u2014good preaching, strong discipleship programs, and a compelling worship experience are not easily reduced to numbers in a spreadsheet.\u00a0<\/p> <p>However, that doesn\u2019t mean that social science tools cannot be used to understand some of the macro-level factors that impact the trajectory of local churches. To see what data can tell us about this topic, I had to find a list of churches that had experienced tremendous growth in recent years.\u00a0<\/p> <p>I found such a list on Outreach\u2019s website. I wrote a short program to scrape the information from the last several years and drop it into a spreadsheet. <b>This exercise gave me a total sample of 855<\/b><\/p><\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block-login login-toggle\">Already a member? <a href=\"#\">Log in<\/a><\/div>\n\t\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block-content\">\n\t\t\t\t<h2>Unlock premium content!<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t<p>Get access to all Church Answers premium content from our expert contributors plus many other membership benefits.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<h3>$9.97 per month<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t<p>Unlimited access<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/join\/\" class=\"button\">Join Now<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-preview\"><p>What must happen for my church to grow? Many pastors and church leaders ask this question. Whether a church grows its attendance or not is top of mind for any casual observer of American religion. Obviously, some of what drives these dynamics are unmeasurable\u2014good preaching, strong discipleship programs, and a compelling worship experience are not easily reduced to numbers in a spreadsheet.\u00a0<\/p> <p>However, that doesn\u2019t mean that social science tools cannot be used to understand some of the macro-level factors that impact the trajectory of local churches. To see what data can tell us about this topic, I had to find a list of churches that had experienced tremendous growth in recent years.\u00a0<\/p> <p>I found such a list on Outreach\u2019s website. I wrote a short program to scrape the information from the last several years and drop it into a spreadsheet. <b>This exercise gave me a total sample of 855<\/b><\/p><\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block-login login-toggle\">Already a member? <a href=\"#\">Log in<\/a><\/div>\n\t\t\t<div class=\"content-restriction-block-content\">\n\t\t\t\t<h2>Unlock premium content!<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t<p>Get access to all Church Answers premium content from our expert contributors plus many other membership benefits.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<h3>$9.97 per month<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t<p>Unlimited access<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/join\/\" class=\"button\">Join Now<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t","protected":false},"author":17635,"featured_media":826837,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"publish_to_discourse":"0","publish_post_category":"1","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":[1,175,186,14796,180,18058,176],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-826798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-answers","category-grow","category-health-and-metrics","category-monday-wednesday-featured","category-outreach-and-evangelism","category-premium","category-revitalize","membership-content","access-restricted"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How Much of Church Growth Is Based on Demographics? The Data Provides a Compelling and Clear Answer | Church Answers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What must happen for my church to grow? Many pastors and church leaders ask this question. Whether a church grows its attendance or not is top of mind for any casual observer of American religion. Obviously, some of what drives these dynamics are unmeasurable\u2014good preaching, strong discipleship programs, and a compelling worship experience are not easily reduced to numbers in a spreadsheet. However, that doesn\u2019t mean that social science tools cannot be used to understand some of the macro-level factors that impact the trajectory of local churches. To see what data can tell us about this topic, I had to find a list of churches that had experienced tremendous growth in recent years. I found such a list on Outreach\u2019s website. I wrote a short program to scrape the information from the last several years and drop it into a spreadsheet. This exercise gave me a total sample of 855 churches. (I&#039;m unsure why, but the 2021 list featured 155 churches, not 100). So, now I have a really robust sample of growing churches in the United States.\" \/>\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\/how-much-of-church-growth-is-based-on-demographics-the-data-provides-a-compelling-and-clear-answer\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Much of Church Growth Is Based on Demographics? The Data Provides a Compelling and Clear Answer | Church Answers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What must happen for my church to grow? Many pastors and church leaders ask this question. Whether a church grows its attendance or not is top of mind for any casual observer of American religion. Obviously, some of what drives these dynamics are unmeasurable\u2014good preaching, strong discipleship programs, and a compelling worship experience are not easily reduced to numbers in a spreadsheet. However, that doesn\u2019t mean that social science tools cannot be used to understand some of the macro-level factors that impact the trajectory of local churches. To see what data can tell us about this topic, I had to find a list of churches that had experienced tremendous growth in recent years. I found such a list on Outreach\u2019s website. I wrote a short program to scrape the information from the last several years and drop it into a spreadsheet. This exercise gave me a total sample of 855 churches. (I&#039;m unsure why, but the 2021 list featured 155 churches, not 100). 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He served as a pastor in the American Baptist Church for over twenty years, leading First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, IL for 17.5 years until its closure in July 2024.","url":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/author\/ryanburge\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17635"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=826798"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":826859,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826798\/revisions\/826859"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/826837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}