The Typical American Church Is Growing Again.

For about twenty-five years, every pastor of a small church in this country has been handed the same story. Attendance is falling. The nones are rising. Your denomination is shrinking. You are, whether anyone says it kindly or not, managing decline.

The numbers backed it up. Faith Communities Today has been surveying American congregations since 2000, and across that span the median congregation fell by roughly half — from around 137 regular participants down to about 65. That's not a rounding error. That's a generation of pastors watching pews empty while being told to try harder.

So here's a number worth sitting with.

For the first time in about a quarter century, the typical American congregation is adding people rather than losing them. The median has ticked up to somewhere around 70. And separately, Lifeway found that roughly 40% of churches under 200 members reported growth last year.

I want to be careful about what that does and doesn't mean.

What it doesn't mean

It doesn't mean the problem solved itself. A median of 70 is still half of what it was in 2000. One survey cycle is not a trend, and anyone selling you a turnaround narrative off a single data point is selling you something.

It also doesn't mean the underlying distribution changed. Around 70% of American congregations still draw 100 people or fewer, and those churches together account for roughly 14% of all worshipers. Meanwhile something like 78% of churchgoers attend the largest 13% of congregations. The concentration is still extreme. Megachurches — congregations over 2,000 — are well under 1% of American Protestant churches and still pull something like 17% of everyone who attends.

So no, the small church is not suddenly ascendant.

What it does mean

What strikes me is where the growth is showing up.

It isn't concentrated at the top. A substantial share is happening in churches under 200 members — the ones with a bivocational pastor, one part-time administrator, a volunteer who "knows computers," and a roof that needs attention. That's not the story anybody has been telling.

There's a second piece of data that I think belongs next to it. Roughly one in three Gen Z Christians reports gravitating toward smaller, home-based churches and micro-gatherings rather than large ones.

Put those together and a different picture emerges. For twenty years the assumption was that scale wins — that the future belonged to the churches that could produce the best experience, and the small church's job was to survive. There's at least some evidence now that a portion of the next generation is looking for the opposite thing: something small enough that they'd be missed if they didn't show up.

If that's true, then the thing a lot of small churches have been quietly apologizing for turns out to be the asset.

The part that actually costs churches something

Here's where my particular obsession comes in, and I'll admit up front that I have one.

If people are looking for your church right now — and the data suggests some of them are — the overwhelming majority of them will check your website before they ever walk through the door. The number most commonly cited is around 80%. About 41% of those visits happen on a phone. And roughly half of church visitors say that visiting the website made them more likely to attend a service.

That is not a marketing statistic. That is a description of the front door.

Which means the growth showing up in the data is, to some degree, being filtered through a piece of infrastructure that most small churches have not touched in years. I've looked at a lot of these sites. The pattern is remarkably consistent:

The site was built in 2016 or so, by a volunteer or a college student or a deacon's nephew, who has since moved away. Nobody has the login. The service times were correct at the time and are not correct now. The most recent sermon is from March. The address is buried on a contact page rather than sitting on the homepage as a tappable map link. There's no page explaining what happens if you visit — what to wear, what to do with your kids, how long the service runs.

None of that is anyone's fault, exactly. It's what happens when a church's technology has no owner. But every one of those items costs the church people who were already looking.

What I'd actually do about it

If you pastor one of these churches, you don't need a redesign to fix most of this. You need about twenty minutes and a phone.

Open your church's website on your phone — not the office computer, where nobody ever notices the mobile layout is broken. Then check five things:

1. Google your church name and your town. Do you come up first? Is the information correct?
2. Can you find service times without scrolling, pinching, or hunting? They should be in plain text on the homepage. Not inside an image, not in a PDF bulletin — Google can't read either one, and neither can a screen reader.
3. Is your address a tappable map link?
4. Is there a page that tells a stranger what to expect? What to wear. Where to park. What happens to their kids. How long it lasts.
5. What's the date on your latest sermon?

Number five is the one that gets people. A sermon archive that stops in March doesn't read to a visitor as "we're behind on uploads." It reads as "these people might not be here anymore."

The honest version

I build websites for churches, so you should weigh what I'm saying accordingly. But I'd rather be useful than persuasive, so here's the honest version:

Most small churches don't need a new website. They need someone to spend an afternoon fixing four things on the one they have, and then they need somebody whose job it is to notice when something breaks. The second part is the hard part, and it's the part that no amount of software solves on its own.

What I do think is worth saying plainly: after twenty-five years of being told the story was decline, the story appears to have at least partly changed. If people are looking for your church again, it would be a shame for the reason they didn't find you to be a service time that's been wrong since 2020.

Somebody is looking. Make sure they can find you.

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Sources: Faith Communities Today / Hartford Institute for Religion Research congregational surveys, 2000–2025; Lifeway Research; National Congregations Study, Duke University.

If you want a second set of eyes on your church's website, send it to me and we'll send back a written page — what a first-time visitor sees, what's broken, and what to fix first. Free, no pitch, and you don't have to be a customer. If someone else is a better fit for you, we'll tell you that too.