Doing some research today about megachurches and came across this money quote from Chaves (2006):
The bottom line is that the number of very large Protestant churches has increased in almost every denominalion on which we have data…[however]…Roughly speaking, if you look at the 20 biggest churches at time 1, only half of them are still on that list 20 years later, only one quarter are still on the list 40 years later, and only 2 are still on the list 60 years later. It is not that these very large churches peak and then shrink dramatically, although some do. Rather, the biggest churches of the moment are overtaken by a new cobort of churches that have caught that decade’s cultural wave and ridden it to the top, and then those churches are overtaken by the next wave, and on and on.
So in essence, while the trend over time is toward a greater percentage of church goers in larger and larger congregations, it is not the case that large churches keep getting bigger. Rather, new, even larger churches are springing up out of whole cloth. Fascinating.
