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Posted on 01/18/2026 5:27:05 PM PST by SeekAndFind
More Protestant churches are being closed in America than are being planted, and older congregations appear to be bearing the brunt of the contraction, according to data from a new Lifeway Research study.
The study published Tuesday used data collected from 35 denominational groups that represent 58% of U.S. Protestant churches. The Tennessee-based research arm of Lifeway Christian Resources also cited information from the Annual Church Profile for 2023 and 2024 of the Southern Baptist Convention — America’s largest Protestant denomination.
While 4,000 Protestant churches were closed in 2024, Lifeway Research estimates that only 3,800 were started in that year. The estimated 4,000 churches shuttered in 2024 represent nearly 1.4% of the 293,000 Protestant churches highlighted in the U.S. Religion Census 2020.
The analysis also found that 1.4% of active Southern Baptist congregations disbanded or shuttered between 2023 and 2024, while some 0.4% left or were disaffiliated over the period.
"The immediate impact of COVID appears to have passed. Denominations have discovered those that closed during quarantine and never reopened. However, the typical church in America has fewer attendees than it did 20 years ago,” Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, said in a statement on the research. “These assemblies are often weaker than prior generations. But at the same time, new churches are flourishing and a subset of churches are growing.”
While most Protestant pastors in the Lifeway study (94%) don’t believe their churches will be shuttered in the next decade, about 4% disagree with that outlook, and another 2% said they aren’t sure.
Pastors leading congregations with fewer than 50 people attending weekly services were the least likely to agree that their churches would endure another decade. The study also found that new congregations were more likely to be growing than older ones.
A review of SBC data showed that churches that began since 2000 grew by 12%, while membership in churches founded between 1950 and 1999 declined by 11%. Those that started between 1900 and 1949 declined by 13% while those that started before 1900 declined by 11%.
“While the American church landscape changes slowly, it is not standing still,” McConnel said. “The future of Protestant churches in America lies in reaching new people with the offer of salvation through Jesus Christ. Most growth in the U.S. happens in new communities. Church planting is vital to share the gospel in these new communities as well as communities in which the population is changing or previous churches have closed.”
Thom Rainer, a former president and CEO of Lifeway Christian Resources and the founding dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, warned in January 2025 that about 15,000 churches would close last year and another 15,000 would shift from having full-time pastors to part-time pastors in America’s rapidly shifting religious landscape.
“For the first time in modern church history, 15,000 of the churches will cease to exist in a period of one year. Notice that we are projecting that 15,000 churches will close and that 15,000 will move from full-time pastors to part-time pastors,” Rainer wrote in op-e published by The Christian Post. “Those 30,000 churches represent about 1 out of 12 existing churches. The change is dramatic.”
Last November, Boston University theology, philosophy and ethics professor Wesley Wildman, who has researched the impact of secularization on religious groups, blamed the decline on America’s growing secularization as fewer people have a religious affiliation and are attending church services.
“The problem is that nobody knows how to confirm these numbers. We have to go by denominational numbers, which are difficult to collect and often not up-to-date,” Wildman told BU Today. “The 15,000 closures might be overblown. But there is no question that many more than that have closed, and will continue closing, over a period of years.”
Among the key conditions in society that drive religious decline, he contends, is a positive attitude to cultural pluralism that has enabled people to "vote with your feet and leave religious organizations without paying any costly social or family or economic penalty.” Other conditions he cited are "existential security," "education," and "freedom."
“These four factors drive down supernaturalism, which in turn makes religious worldviews and lifeways less plausible for some people, some of whom remain spiritual,” Wildman wrote.
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Importing millions of violent Mexican Catholics who ethnically cleanse entire cities - like much of greater LA - will do that. Also DFW, Austin, Houston…
The Protestant churches see their congregants leaving for more friendly places.
It seems to be all churches, not just protestant ...
My bestie’s husband’s church was down to a handful of elderly members. They hired a liberal, female minister who mostly slept and rarely worked. Seemed the church would be gone with the last members dying out. Also seemed like it wouldn’t be much of a loss.
many of them went woke/satanic when libtards and LGBT commie freaks infiltrated and marched through the institutions and took them over from within.
The Roe v Wade effect.
Non-Denominational fundamental churches are doing very well and are growing.
Churches used to be based on Biblical teaching.
Now many have become secularized and political which kills the church, so the Christians stop going to “a church” and have Bible study groups instead.
RE: Importing millions of violent Mexican Catholics who ethnically cleanse entire cities - like much of greater LA - will do that.
I don’t see how there is a cause and effect of more Mexican Catholics coming to the USA and the closing of churches with older congregations.
In fact, speaking about Mexico, Evangelicals in Mexico have been growing rapidly, roughly doubling their share of the population over the last few decades and rising about 50% in just the last census decade.
See here:
https://evangelicalfocus.com/world/10915/evangelicals-are-112-of-mexican-population-new-census-says
If this is so, wouldn’t it result in MORE Protestant ( Evangelical ) churches opening? Unless of course, you’re saying that Evangelical Mexicans DON’T tend to move to the USA...
We had one of the largest crowds I have seen in a long time in church this morning.
That’s right.
Agreed. And the article stated that their numbers were based on denominational data.
RE: We had one of the largest crowds I have seen in a long time in church this morning.
What denomination is that?
“Many of them went woke…”
That’s right. The pastors started telling congregants they should be ashamed of themselves for being white and to apologize.
Also, many of them became very strong supporters of the LGBTQ+ movement, including leading bishops.
Mainstream Protestant congregations have gone woke and stupid. The Non-Denominational fundamental congregations have stepped up to fill the gap. We attend a fundamental church that started out with about 20 people and has over 500 regular attendees ten years later.
It sounds bleak, and it is certainly disheartening, but I look at it as separating the wheat from the chaff.
At some point the churches are going to shrink. Those who remain will be the faithful. Those who do not will be cut off from God’s Kingdom.
Our job, if we are Christians, nevertheless remains the same: Go, and make disciples as you are going.
Two major groups of churches are closing.
First are the ones that are in dying rural small towns. There’s not much that can be done about that.
The other group are the ultra liberal pro homosexual churches - that’s a good thing.
Let’s not weep when the ECUSA, the PCUSA, and the UMC churches bleed members.
Los Angeles used to be almost 100% WASP.
Churches like the Four Square church and Seventh Day Adventist were heavily attended. The usual Protestant denominations were also extremely popular; Episcopal and Baptist alike. The Inland Empire was essentially founded by the Mormons.
The Crystal Cathedral was founded in Garden Grove in 1955 by Robert Schuller and went belly up in 2010. Now it’s a Mega Catholic church, supposedly home to 1.3M Catholics. You think those are all Italians and Irish? It’s next door to Santa Ana, a town that used to be 100% working class White in the ‘50s (had cousins there) and is now 110% Mexican.
That’s just a couple of examples.
Black people are predominantly Baptist being from the South. Those churches in South LA and Compton are now almost gone; the Mexican gangs ran all the black people out, they live in Inglewood and further North (like Lancaster) now.
Los Angeles in 1930 had these statistics:
Total: 2,208,492
White: 1,949,882
Black: 46,425
Chinese: 3,572
Indian: 997
Japanese: 35,390
Mexican: 167,024 (or about 7.5% of the population)
1930 was the only year they broke out the category “Mexican”. Between 1930-33, Roosevelt (the Great Liberal) “repatriated” between 300K - 1M Mexicans from the US, so we can assume that the fraction of Mexicans in Lost Angeles was somewhat lower 10 years later when the population of Los Angeles was 2,785,643 total, of whom 2,660,042 were listed as White. In that year, the Mexican population would have been counted as “White”; LULAC had lobbied for that starting in 1929. So we can reasonably assume that only about 5% of the population in 1940 was Mexican, or about 133K.
That’s what historical LA looked like. You can assume that the vast majority of the White population of LA was Protestant. The Catholic Irish and Italians were much heavier in SF for a variety of reasons.
During WWII, the bracero program brought something like double the number of Mexicans into the ag areas of LA and Orange county, but Operation Wetback in 1954 took an enormous number of them back. But the fraction of the total population grew because of people who didn’t leave, and by 1970 with increased post 1965 immigration, they were at about 14% of the population...at least in LA. Orange county was whiter then ever due to out migration from LA to the ‘burbs.
So the picture is one of increasing encroachment, followed in the late 1980s by a full scale onslaught, turbocharged by the ‘86 amnesty: there were far more illegals amnestied then anyone thought likely, and they all brought on average 3 “family reunification” sponsored people. By the early 90s, that’s like 10M new immigrants, mostly LEGAL, virtually all from Mexico (~90%).
How many do you think were Mainline Protestants? Two? Three?
The Catholic church in LA exploded. And the process of White Flight along with Black Expulsion homogenized large areas that used to be either working class White or Black into a “sea of Mexicans” as it was put by one politician.
Displacement works in a lot of ways. Disappearing churches is just one of them.
“The problem is that nobody knows how to confirm these numbers. We have to go by denominational numbers, which are difficult to collect and often not up-to-date,”
Fly those pride flags!
Its a sign of these congregations’ stage-4 cancer.
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