The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

FACT 2020: How Congregations Have Changed in the Last 20 Years

by Darren Slade, PhD – FaithX Director of Research

The organization, Faith Communities Today, along with 21 other Christian faith traditions, just released the results of the largest national survey of congregational trends in the United States. Spanning two decades of research (from 2000‒2020), the “Twenty Years of Congregational Change” reports findings from interviewing 15,278 congregations among 80 separate denominations and religious groups.

What’s significant about this particular survey is that it tracks multiple levels of change within American congregational life during both the pre- and early COVID era, much of which was predicted by the FaithX Project and its groundbreaking “Religion Singularity” research.

Continue reading to learn about some of the major highlights and results of the survey.

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Total Christian Clergy Deaths Resulting from COVID-19


by Darren Slade, PhD – FaithX Director of Research

Over the past year, the FaithX Project, in partnership with researchers from the Global Center for Religious Research (GCRR), conducted a study to answer one very important question about clergy deaths:

How many Christian “clergy” members, from all denominations and traditions, died as a result of the COVID-19 virus?

While the study can only provide estimates and statistical probabilities, the research is finally complete and the preliminary numbers are in.

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Does the Future Have a Church? And in What Form?

By the Rev. Ken Howard

“Does the Church have a future?” is the wrong question.
The real question is, “Does the future have a Church?”
– Attributed variously

I think I agree… I would only add, “And if it does, in what form will that Church be?” 

It was a little over three years ago in 2017 that I published my research paper, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity,” in the Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society. But I still prefer my working title, “Singularity: The Death of Religion and the Resurrection of Faith.”

If the term “Singularity” sounds kind of astrophysics-y or SciFi-ish to you, good! It’s supposed to. Because institutional Christianity is entering a kind of wormhole that will deliver us into a context so different, it might as well be an entirely new universe. And what we do now to prepare our congregations and judicatories will determine whether they will survive and thrive or be consigned to oblivion.

The crux of the Religion Singularity is this: Christianity has become better at division than multiplication – we are producing new churches and denominations at an exponentially faster rate than we are producing new Christians. My 2017 projections indicated that by the end of the century there would be only 17,000 Christians per denomination and 67 Christians per worship center. And that’s PER not IN, which means that when you factor out the “Nones,” the average membership of those institutions could be less than half that, which means that all of our ecclesiatical institutions – from congregations to judicatories to denominations – will have become unsustainable in their current forms. 

And that’s B.C.: Before Covid accelerated those trends and crushed all of our familiar paradigms about what Church was supposed to be. This year, for the first time in the history of the U.S., fewer than half the population now “attends Church” (in either physical or virtual form).

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MissionWebs and Drive Times: Defining the boundaries of our neighborhood

This post on MissionWebs and Drive Times is written
by Ken Howard

If “Love your neighbor” remains a core command for followers of Jesus, both as individuals and as congregations, then “Who are the people of our neighborhood?” (cue Mr. Rogers’ theme song) remains our core question. 

But before we can ask “who?,” we first have to ask “where?”… Where are the practical boundaries of our neighborhood? 

After all, we don’t have the wherewithal to show infinite love to everyone everywhere. Unlike God, both as individuals and as congregations, our love has limits. Limited time, limited attention, limited space, limited resources. So we have to prioritize how and where and to what end we will spend those resources to reap the most good for the most people. In other words, we have to establish reasonable boundaries for “our” neighborhood to which we will open our hearts and our doors. 

Back in the old days, when denominational affiliation was more important to people than it is now, hierarchies established our boundaries for us. These were both our “fishing ponds” (the area from which our people would come) and our “cure of souls” (the area for which we were responsible to serve). 

For many reasons, those kinds of boundaries don’t work any more. So how do we define the area in which we will cast our nets and for which we will take responsibility?

MapDash for Faith Communities offers two ways to ask these questions: one is called “MissionWebs,” the other Drive Time Boundaries.

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The Religion Singularity: What Is It? And Why Should You Care?

This post is the first in a five-part series on the Religion Singularity.

Religion Singularity is a term I first coined in a paper entitled “Singularity: The Death of Religion and the Resurrection of Faith,” presented earlier this year at the 2016 Conference on Religion and Society in Washington, DC.

If the term “Singularity” sounds to you kind off astrophysics-y to you, bringing up visions of black holes and wormholes, good. It’s supposed to. Because if you are a leader of a faith community, how you prepare your congregation for the Religion Singularity will determine whether crossing its event horizon will consign your faith community to oblivion or deliver it into a entirely new universe.

In a nutshell, the Religion Singularity can be boiled down to three trend lines:

  • Denominations. It took the institutional Christianity 1900 years to get to 1,600 denominations worldwide, by 2000, the number stood at 34,200, and by the year 2100, there will be over 240,000.
  • Worship Centers. In 1900 there were 400,000 worship centers worldwide, by 2000, about 3.5 million, and by 2100, over 66 million.
  • Christians.  Here’s where the rub begins. 600 million Christians in 1900, 2 billion in 2000, and 4.3 billion by 2100. Growing solidly, but currently at about half the rate of denominations and worship centers.

I’ll pause for a moment while you do the math…

Religion Singularity Small
Source: “Status of Global Mission 2014,” Bulletin of Missionary Research (January, 2010): 1.

Got it? See the problem?

That’s right…

Sometime during the last century we crossed an event horizon, and now we are caught in the gravitational well of the Religion Singularity. If trends hold – and there’s no reason to think they won’t since they’ve been moving along at the current pace for decades – we are going to see catastrophic drops in the sizes of both denominations and worship centers.

Worst case scenario: by 2100 we are looking at an average denomination of just under 18,000 and an average worship center size of under 70.

Decline in Denoms and Worship Ctrs

Which means…

Denominations? Unsustainable. Dead within the next 100 years. Hard to see a way around it. The Religion Singularity will be a black hole for denominations.

Worship Centers? Unsustainable in their current, church-centric form. But… if they can find ways to become more lean, vision-driven, creative, and experimental, they may find a way to turn the Religion Singularity into a wormhole that will deliver them into a new way of being Church.

So if you are a leader of a congregation, you have a choice…

What’s it going to be?

Black hole?

Or Wormhole?

Click here to read the full paper: “Singularity: The Death of Religion and the Resurrection of Faith” (on Academia.edu).

Click here for Part 2