On any given weekend, _____% of U.S. churchgoers attend a megachurch.
Please note–the answer is now posted in the comments below–KSH.
On any given weekend, _____% of U.S. churchgoers attend a megachurch.
Please note–the answer is now posted in the comments below–KSH.
75%
Does that include Roman Catholic parishes, since many suburban ones get over 3000 people? If so I would guess 75% as well.
Just for fun I’m going to say 25%.
My guess would be 2%
I’m guessing 15%
Wikipedia and the Hartford Institute for Religion Research exclude large RC parishes from their definition of Megachurch. (The Hartford Institute explains why in detail.)
My guess was 50%.
10%.
6%
10 percent, maybe less?
Ralinda copied me.
Well, I guess that depends on how you define “megachurch.” If you exclude Catholics, and define a megachurch as a Protestant church with an average weekend attendance of more than 2,000 people (including kids) I’d guess the percentage falls between Robert Lundy’s 25% estimate and William Sulik’s 15%, though closer to the latter, maybe 18%.
However, one thing is very clear, the proportion of Protestants worshipping each Sunday in a megachurch is growing significantly. And I think it will continue to grow for the forseeable future. Not least because of the sheer quality of the programming and the variety of options people increasingly are looking for. And the preference for megachurches is partly generational. The younger you are, the more likely you are to end up in a really big church, if you go at all.
But I like what Rick Warren says, poking fun at megachurch pastors like himself (and his weenend attendance is over 25K). “[i]The only people who like megachurches are their pastors.[/i]” That is, the people generally put up with their monster size in order to get the other benefits such huge churches offer.
David Handy+
Just for fun (as Robert Lundy says), I’ll toss in an observation appropriate for folks in the so-called “mainline” churches. Back in 1906, the last time the US Census Burea allowed itself to conduct a religious survey of the population, the number of Americans who worshiped in a Protestant megachurch was miniscule, but what few megachurches there were tended to be “mainline” and located in the central downtown area of the largest cities. And the Episcopal Church would probably have had a fair share of them, maybe 5-10 of the top 100 (largest) Protestant churches in the country.
No more. My how have things changed! Now the vast majority of the largest Protestant churches are conservative evangelical, fundamentalist, or Pentecostal churches; they’re generally in the suburbs, and at least 80 of the largest 100 would be outside the old historic “mainline” denominations. And TEC wouldn’t have even a single parish among that top 100.
David Handy+
I cheated a little, so I won’t give a percentage. But I think it would be worthwhile for people to give a guess at the number of Protestant and Catholic megachurches.
I’m going to take a completely different tack, so bear with me. At rural county fairs one of the most popular booths is often the “Guess the Weight of the Steer” gig. Typically you plop down something between 2 and 5 bucks to make an official guess. The winner gets a thousand bucks and the balance goes to support the local 4-H or whatever. Great fun.
I know of one such booth in which there were about 4500 guesses on a steer that weighed 1198 pounds. Those guesses were all over the place, from about 600 lb to 2300 lb. However — the [i]average[/i] of those guesses was 1197 lb, and the median was 1201.
On the whole, multiple choices got it almost exactly. Any individual pick was probably WAY off.
Now transfer that mental model to the economy. Do you wish to rely on the average of multiple guesses, or one bureaucrat who thinks he’s got it right?
35%
I am guessing 60%.
9%, as per the Christian Century, July 27, 2010 issue, on page 22
Thanks, Kendall. It was a fun game. Ralinda and Utah Benjamin were amazingly close, at 10% “or less.” Congratulations to them.
But wait a decade or two, and unless Christ returns first, my guess of 18% probably won’t be far off by then.
David Handy+
Thanks, Kendall. I was off by ~15%. I’m relieved that it’s not that high. Attending megachurches reminds me of going to a concert hall. It may be entertaining, but it lessens the sense of personal involvement. I prefer going where the priest and the other parishioners get to know you, where we develop a sense of community…worshipping, helping, working and praying with each other. For me, it’s easier there to attend to the still small voice within.
Kendall, if you believe the HartSem numbers here, that’s actually the percentage of Protestant churchgoers who attend a megachurch, assuming that big Catholic parishes are by definition not megachurches. Looking at the base National Congregations Survey data, I cannot directly extract data on megachurches, because their size category on direct queries only looks at “500 and up” in total Sunday attendance. However, it’s striking to look at a cross tabulation of “denomination” by “total attendance at all services on Sunday” using this page and making the selection by number of persons. 49% of American churches have ASA between 100 and 500, and 43% of attendees go to a church in this range, with almost half attendees going to larger churches and only 8% going to smaller churches. ECUSA shows a more exaggerated version of this, with the vast majority attending parishes in the middle category. The Catholics, however, show a completely different pattern: 88% of American Catholics go to a church with an ASA of 500 or more, and over 55% of Catholic parishes are this large. There’s a glitch in the data that suggests some similar pattern among some neodenoms, but since the data produces two categories with the same name it’s hard to say what it means, and in any case the shift is nothing like as extreme.
If I combine the percentages from the HartSem study with those of the NCS, I get Protestant megachurches accounting for around 6% of American attendance on a Sunday.
Woo hoo!
My guesstimate would be somewhere between 25-35%, but let me give you an example from my own experience in my former diocese of El Camino Real: My former parish’s ASA (I won’t name the parish out of respect for friends who are still there), was about 100 or so on any given Sunday, and the membership was about 350 people. There are two megachurches about a mile away, and their ASA was in the neighborhood of 2-3000 each. That told me that people in our parish weren’t hearing what they wanted to hear, and I knew of quite a few who occasionally attended those services. One of the churches was First Baptist and the other was a non-denominational church called the Cathedral of Faith.
My guess was 10%, but I was too humble – no, lazy – to say so. Now I am proud to say I am neither!
Can honestly say that I guessed 5%, but I also looked at it in a broad stroke a couple years ago in a class looking at various styles of churches.