2018 Largest Participating Churches
The shape of the American megachurch is constantly shifting.
What are the churches at the forefront of the movement and how are they innovating?
Each year, the Lifeway Research team surveys churches, verifies the numbers, calculates the results and compiles the lists. In preparation for this annual report, we solicited participation from the churches that were featured in our previous reports. This is a self-reported survey, based on attendance averages, not membership. Churches that participated answered questions about their 2022 in-person, online and adult discipleship attendance averages for February and March (excluding Easter) as compared to their 2021 numbers.
In addition this year, to provide as complete of a list as possible for the Largest churches, we also drew numbers from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research (HIRR.Hartsem.edu ), which is not a survey, but is secondary research drawn from publicly available attendance data. We integrated that public data with the self-reported survey from Lifeway. Whenever the survey and the public data reported on the same church, we reported the church’s response in the survey.
Explore the Outreach 100 study and how your church can participate in the coming years »
