America's Largest Churches: Over a Decade of Data

Megachurches rise, fall, and evolve — but the biggest keep getting bigger.

People are obsessed with the size of churches. That’s what I’ve learned in doing a bunch of Q&A sessions with folks from various constituencies around the country. They want to know what a typical church looks like, but they are also deeply interested in understanding what’s going on with the largest churches in the United States. They almost seem impossible to really wrap your head around. How can a single religious body have a regular attendance that is 20,000 or 30,000 people? For most of us, church is a place where 100 folks gather on a Sunday. For people who attend mega-churches, it’s something else entirely.

I’ve visited a couple of these churches in my travels and I’m always struck by just the enormity of the whole outfit. Of course, the physical campuses are huge. One thing that really struck me was how wide their hallways were in these humongous buildings. They have to be to make it faster and safer for those exiting the sanctuary to get out to their cars in an orderly fashion. But, also I am struck by the professionalism of the folks working there. The sound person is not some retired guy who knows just enough to unmute the pastor’s mic at the right time. In fact, they have numerous folks working the soundboard who have degrees in audio engineering.

I’ve written a bit about mega-churches before based on a list provided from the Hartford Institute and there’s a lot to learn there. But, I have another data source now that gives me even more insight into the largest churches in the United States.

For the last decade, Outreach Magazine (in collaboration with Lifeway Research) has collected a list of the 100 largest churches in the United States. I am in no way responsible for the data collection for this project and I’m sure that the research team would tell you that this list is probably not 100% accurate. But guess what? It would be next to impossible to compile a list like this without leaving out a church or two. This is as good as we are going to get. If you are interested in how this list was pulled together, there’s a bit about their methodology to be found at this link.

This data has been collected with regularity all the way back to 2015. I wrote a scraping program to acquire the information from the Outreach website and now I’ve got an absolute treasure trove of information about these churches. In total there are 1,100 entries on my list (100 churches x 11 years of data), but here’s the first big revelation from this effort: there are only 209 unique churches to be found. Which means that a whole lot of these congregations are “frequent flyers” in that they appear every time. In fact, 20 churches show up every single year and another 18 show up in ten of the eleven years. Big churches stay big.

However, there is some real variation at the top of the list. I just visualized the largest 10 churches from the 2015 list and then the 2025 list.

One huge thing that jumps out to me is that the biggest churches in the United States have gotten a whole lot bigger in the last decade. In 2015, the ten largest churches combined for a total membership of just over 260,000. In 2025, that attendance number rose to over 427,000. The fifth largest church in the 2025 data (North Point), had 37,000 attenders. That number would have put it at the top of the list in 2015. Speaking of North Point - they are one of the churches that shows up in the top ten in both years. There are several on the list like this: Church of the Highlands (Birmingham), CCV (Peoria, AZ), Crossroads Church (Cincinnati), Christ Fellowship Church (Palm Beach Gardens), Southeast Christian (Louisville), and Saddleback (Lake Forest, CA).

There are some newcomers to the list in 2025, though. One is Life.Church. It’s based in Edmond, OK and was just added to the dataset in 2022. (Don’t ask me why it wasn’t there before that date, I don’t know). But you’ve also had the addition of Lakewood Church, which is run by Joel Osteen. Again, that one has been very large for a while but only recently was added to the Outreach list. The other newcomer was Eagle Brook Church in Centerville, MN.

But I know what you all really want to do - you want an interactive map where you can pan and zoom and look at where these churches are located. That’s exactly what I’ve done for you below. Each church is marked with a pin and you can click on that pin to give you the name, location, and the last reported attendance from each church. I’ve also colored in the circles with the last year they appeared on the list and the size of the circles denotes the last reported attendance.