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Welcome!
Click here to access the internet’s most complete, current and sortable list of the world’s largest-attendance churches. This global list is growing weekly — especially with help from people like you! You can sort it by continent, country, city, church size, pastor name, pastor birth year, year pastor started, year the church was founded, theological family, whether it’s multisite, whether it has branches in the United States, and more.
I’ve been researching global megachurches since 1991, contributing to a North American megachurch list (click here to open it) of U.S. and Canadian churches since 2006, and posting this global version online since 2010. I’m the first to quickly acknowledge that it’s a nearly impossible task without help from readers like you around the world who are warmly invited to offer suggestions, additions and corrections. Please contact me, Warren Bird, Ph.D., at [email protected].
The list is not based on membership, ministry impact, seating capacity, building size, steeple height, media reach or even number people who call the church “home,” but on actual weekly worship attendance — adults and children, all services, all physical campuses on an average weekend for the year, not counting anyone twice. It is limited to Protestant congregations. Multisite churches are counted as part of one congregation if they are all under the same leader and governance, adhere to the same doctrine, identify together under a similar name or association, and share finances at some level.
Click to View the World Megachurches List (To download a copy to your computer, click the image above, then choose File –> Download as)
Spread the Word, Improve the List
Feel free also to publicize or cite this listing, crediting this shortcut link: https://exponential.org/world.
Over 75 countries are currently represented on the list, including small-population ones like Fiji and Latvia. When this list gets fully populated, will every country be shown to have at least one megachurch? Definitely not. The largest-attendance Protestant church in Iceland is less than 500 people. In some countries like Vietnam, individual churches are not legally allowed to grow to megachurch size–or in Albania the police are closing the country’s largest churches (see an article here).
People sometimes ask how I get information that goes on our global list. Sources include email correspondence both with the churches and those who have visited or studied them. I also study the church websites along with newspaper or internet articles about the churches, often with help from the Google Chrome’s Translate function; the day I wrote this paragraph, I’ve used it to translate from Hungarian, German, Spanish, Malay, and Portuguese. I especially reach out to scholars of religion in the same country as the church in question. Sadly, many countries on this list are still way underrepresented–India, Brazil, Philippines and Nigeria–to name a few.
My favorite way of learning is to visit these congregations in person, chat with their people, tour their campus, and interview the senior pastor. Over recent years I’ve had the privilege of visiting the largest church in many countries ranging from Korea, China and Singapore to Ukraine and United Kingdom. It’s exciting to find thriving churches from Hungary to The Netherlands, from Kenya to Australia. I’m hoping next for an invitation from some of the amazingly large churches in Brazil, the Philippines and Nigeria!
Scholars might be interested that work on the North American list of large churches began in 1984 when Leadership Network hired someone who had just written a doctoral dissertation on large churches to compile an initial list. Since then Leadership Network built and updated its database through annual denominational lists, other public lists like those in the Outreach “Top 100” issue, numerous research projects and site visits (by a wide variety of organizations), extensive use of “Google Alerts,” and ongoing referrals by pastors and consultants.
1. Accurate data allows us to see the larger picture of what God seems to be doing. For starters, you’ll observe that the world’s biggest churches are not in the United States (and further, the United States did not even start the trend of megachurches). You’ll also see which countries have the newer growth of larger churches (and as this list grows, I’m convinced that we’ll document that there are far more megachurches outside the United States than in it). As one example, India today has more believers than at any time in its 4,000-year history, and as my list populates, I suspect we’ll find a growing number of megachurches there. Looking at the entire global list, you can explore everything from average pastor age to the likelihood level of Pentecostal/charismatic theology in these large churches.
2. Churches on this list tend to be innovators and entrepreneurs. This ranges from how they use technology to how they impact their communities for Christ. For example, by visiting the websites of these churches, reading their mission and vision statements, and perusing the ministries they list, you can sense the heartbeat and future directions of these pacesetters.
3. A list like this invites a level playing field for helpful conversation about global movers and shakers. For good or bad, larger churches are influential, both in their communities and also in influencing other churches. For example, a pastor in one country helped me improve the list for his region by sending his church planters in training and other apprentice pastors to visit a bunch of churches that everyone thought were the country’s largest. They did a nose count of all weekend worship services at each of these churches. “Before this project we thought we were just a small player in reaching our city,” the pastor told me. “But the churches we thought were really big turned out to be about the same size as us. So that means our responsibility in reaching our city for Christ is larger than we had previously thought.”
4. It also helps churches who are listed to network with each other. Larger churches have more in common by size (attendance and/or budget) than by most other factors. People always like to know who their peers are, and they’re often stretched by hanging out with their peers.
5. This list serves as a starting point for additional research. The possibilities are innumerable. I welcome you to contact me with your ideas ([email protected]). The Washington Post, for example, used the global megachurches list to make five fascinating visualizations. Here’s one of their graphics:
– NOTE: If you have other questions, please submit them to [email protected]
by Warren Bird
At Easter, Christmas and other big days when church attendances surge, newspapers like to raise the question of which congregations are the biggest. Many also try to name which church was the first megachurch – churches drawing 2,000 or more adults and children in worship on a typical weekend.
Journalists often identify the first megachurch in the United States as the 2,890-seat Crystal Cathedral founded by Robert H. Schuller (and which declared bankruptcy in 2010, and the facility was sold and reconfigured by a Catholic church). But the claim was always wrong because it was founded in 1955 and didn’t cross the 2,000 attendance mark until the 1970s.
Others cite greater Akron, Ohio, where three of the nation’s largest-attendance churches were based in the 1960s. One was Rex Humbard’s 5,400-seat Cathedral of Tomorrow, Cuyahoga Falls, OH, built in 1958 and filled on a regular basis. However, after lawsuits and a severe attendance decline in the early 1980s, Humbard sold the facility and accompanying television studio to fellow televangelist Ernest Angley in 1994, and the church is now known as Grace Cathedral in Akron, but is no longer a megachurch in attendance.
Even earlier was Akron Baptist Temple, started in 1934 by Dallas Billington as a Sunday school, which like most churches until the 1960s drew more people in Sunday school attendance than in worship. By the 1950s the worship attendance regularly exceeded 4,000, but it currently is no longer a megachurch in attendance (and has announced plans to sell the its campus, much of which is mothballed, and relocate).
Likewise First Baptist Church, Fort Worth, Texas, reported a Sunday school attendance of 5,200 in 1928, at least 2,000 of which attended worship. Also in downtown Dallas, Texas, several churches — First Baptist, First Presbyterian, First Methodist and First Christian — were among the largest churches in their denomination, typically drawing 2,000 or more attendance at worship during the 1950s and beyond. Notable churches subsequently grew in many cities across the United States, such as First Baptist Church, Hammond, Indiana, which during the 1970s was the nation’s largest-attendance church.
Among predominantly African-American congregations, one of nation’s largest in the early 1900s was what’s today known today as Philadelphia’s Tindley Temple, a Methodist church. At one point it drew several thousand congregants, in large part because of the Reverend Charles Tindley, a charismatic pastor whose gospel hymns include “We Shall Overcome.” (Tindley Temple today is no longer a megachurch.)
Some churches that draw more than 2,000 in weekly attendance today (or in recent years) were founded in the 1700s and 1800s, but their worship attendance did not regularly exceed 2,000 until more recent decades. These include: The Falls Church, Falls Church, VA, an Episcopal congregation founded in 1734 (but has relocated due to a doctrinal and property dispute); Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Baltimore, MD, founded in 1784; First Baptist Church, Sevierville, TN, founded 1789; Mud Creek Baptist Church, Hendersonville, NC, founded in 1803; Park Street Church, Boston, MA, founded in 1807; and Abyssinian Baptist Church, New York City, founded in 1809.
Early American Megachurches
Other churches had 2,000-plus attendances in their early days but have not been that size in the last 100-plus years. These include Sansom Street Church, Philadelphia, built in 1812 and seating 4,000; First Baptist Church, Baltimore, built in 1818 and seating 4,000; Chatham Street Chapel, Philadelphia, built in 1832 and seating 2,500; Broadway Tabernacle, in the Bowery section of lower Manhattan, built in 1836 and seating 4,000; First Free Baptist Church, Boston, an African-American congregation built in the 1840s and seating 2,000; Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, built in 1850 and seating 2,000; Central Presbyterian Church built in 1891 and seating 7,000; and Bethany Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, built in 1866 and seating 3,000.
Many churches had temporary surges past the 2,000 attendance marks, even ones in small communities like Nantucket, MA, during late 1700s where the Quaker Meeting House “sometimes attracted as many as 2,000 people—more than a quarter of the island’s population” according to Smithsonian magazine. In the mid 1800s, as many as 2,000 people per week attended church in the Capitol in Washington DC as a congregation raised money for building a new sanctuary they could call their own. For example, on December 13, 1857, the Rev. Dr. George Cummins preached before a crowd of 2,000 worshipers in the first public use of the House chamber, according to William C. Allen (Architectural Historian of the Capitol), A History of the United States Capitol, A Chronicle of Design, Construction, and Politics (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 2001), p. 271.
However it is The Moody Church of Chicago that bears the distinction of being the oldest to both break the 2,000 threshold in attendance and to also be over 2,000 in the current era. The church facility, built in 1876 and known as Chicago Avenue Church, could hold 10,000 people. It was founded and led by the famous evangelist D.L. Moody. The church was filled to overflowing many times before Moody’s death in 1899. The church today, now known as Moody Church and moved in 1915 to a nearby location, has an auditorium seating capacity of 4,000, and its current facility currently draws almost 2,500 people in weekly attendance (though over the years it has sometimes dipped below 2,000 in attendance).
Big Churches First Seen in the New Testament?
Worldwide, the practice of forming very large-attendance churches goes back many centuries. The New Testament refers to certain banner-attendance assemblies, such as Pentecost when “about 3,000” were converted (Acts 2:41). The overall church continued to grow to 5,000 (Acts 4:4) and beyond (Acts 21:20). But the weekly meetings were not akin to today’s megachurch because the earliest Christian communities generally met as smaller groups in homes, according to New Testament record. The first known church building was not built until 201 A.D., and many churches continued to convene in homes even after the Roman Empire legalized Christianity in 313.
Yet over the centuries occasional large-attendance churches developed including the great Abbey of Cluny, the great cathedrals of Constantinople and Europe, and the tabernacles build around the ministries of such evangelists and teachers as Charles Spurgeon in England. As a case in point, Spurgeon preached regularly, often 10 times in a week to audiences of 6,000 and more. He once addressed an audience of 23,654 (without aid of amplification). He grew the congregation of New Park Street Church, later named the Metropolitan Tabernacle, from an attendance of 232 in 1854 to 5,311 in 1892, making it the largest independent congregation in the world for a time. Prime Ministers, presidents, and other notables flocked to hear him. However, attendance there today has been considerably less than 2,000 for several decades.
These were not Europe’s first megachurches either. The last ten years of John Calvin’s life in Geneva (1555-1564) were preoccupied with missions in France, such as in Bergerac: “From day to day, we are growing, and God has caused His Word to bear such fruit that at sermons on Sundays, there are about four- to five-thousand people,” he wrote. Another letter from Montpelier rejoiced, “Our church, thanks to the Lord, has so grown and so continues to grow every day that we are obliged to preach three sermons on Sundays to a total of five- to six-thousand people.” A pastor in Toulouse wrote: “Our church has grown to the astonishing number of about eight- to nine-thousand souls.”
Today the world’s largest-attendance churches are in Korea, Africa, and South America—symbolic of the geographical shift in Christianity noted by historian Philip Jenkins (2002). Most of the world’s best attended churches were started in the last century, many in the last decades. It is still unknown which church globally was the earliest both to exceed 2,000 in attendance and to continue at that size to this day.
Megachurch Researcher Firsts
First to identify and track the world’s and nation’s largest attendance churches: Elmer Towns, first in magazine articles, and then in books like The Ten Largest Sunday Schools and What Makes Them Grow (1972), The World’s Largest Sunday School (1974), and The Complete Book of Church Growth(1979)
First to use the word megachurch in a book: Francis Dubois, How Churches Grow in an Urban World, 1978.
First book with specific chapters on megachurches: Prepare Your Church for the Future, Carl George with Warren Bird, 1991.
First book to use the word megachurch in a book title: John N. Vaughan, Megachurches and American Cities: How Churches Grow, 1993.
Where Did the Word Megachurch Come From?
The word church has been with us for centuries, but the prefix mega first emerged in the 19th century. Most uses were specialized such as megalith (stone of great size), megalopolis (very large city), megaphone (device that makes the voice sound much bigger) and megahertz (a million cycles per second). In the 1940s, it became part of common speech with the terms megaton and megabuck. In the 1970s, institutional uses arose such as megacorporations and megamall, both of which described new developments associated with controversy. The word megachurch was used by scholars and researchers in the 1970s, likely coined by them.
The term megachurch first appeared in a newspaper the week of Easter 1983 in the Miami Herald describing the 12,000 people anticipated to attend the 3,400-seat Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where D. James Kennedy was pastor at the time. Soon other newspapers and magazines were using the term megachurch to describe big-attendance churches with very large facilities. The new term filled a vacuum: a small number of large-attendance Protestant churches had existed for centuries in metropolitan areas, with fewer than 100 in the United States by 1983, but there was no unique term to describe them other than perhaps super church, a term used only occasionally. (And currently Coral Ridge is no longer a megachurch in attendance.)
By Warren Bird
Across the world, there are almost 5 million Christian congregations (worship centers) – specifically, 4,738,000 churches according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity’s “Status for Global Mission – 2014” (line 42). In some countries, especially those where Christianity is all but illegal, these gatherings of Christians are almost exclusively house churches in form. Only in some places are Christians allowed join the public square with known and established places to gather. Thus for better or for worse, only in some countries are large open-to-the-public churches free to develop.
Megachurches – those averaging 2,000 or more in weekly worship attendance, adults and children – do exist in several dozen countries. Many countries, even giant nations like India, have received minimal research in terms of how churches are growing and multiplying. I look forward to the day when churches worldwide, including larger churches, receive equal study and attention to what has been done in the United States. For now, megachurches in North America have been researched more than those in other countries, and so here’s what we know about large churches in the United States:
Scope and Size
0.5% – While almost 10% of Protestant churchgoers attend a megachurch, these churches represent only about half of one percent of the roughly 320,000 Protestant churches that exist in the United States. For more breakdown by size, see these Hartford Institute for Religion Research FAQs.
1,750 – Current number of megachurches in the United States, according to church lists compiled by Leadership Network.
46 – Amount of the 50 states have a megachurch (not yet in Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont). Megachurches can be found in Washington DC as well.
Almost all – Number of Protestant denominations that have at least one megachurch from the biggest (Southern Baptists, United Methodists, Evangelical Lutherans, etc.) to smaller denominations (Foursquare, Christian and Missionary Alliance, etc.). Most denominational megachurches hold their denominational affiliation lightly –Saddleback is Southern Baptist, and Life.Church is Evangelical Covenant, for example – and many are nondenominational, such as Lakewood, Willow Creek, North Point and Potter’s House.
92% – I’ve personally visited 46 of the 50 (or 92%) largest-attendance Protestant churches in the United States.
By Warren Bird
If you do an internet search for “biggest churches” or similar, you will find lots of websites listed. The vast majority deal with facilities, not people. They track the most square footage, the most acreage, the tallest buildings, the highest steeples, the costliest construction, the longest times from groundbreaking to final completion, and the like.
Some mention big gathering halls for religious conventions, such as the Redeemed Christian Church of God which in 2013 opened a 100,000-seat pavilion that it built for semi-annual all-church conferences. But at this point, it’s not being used for weekly worship.
I’m most interested in the way churches serve people’s spiritual needs, so my curiosities about “biggest buildings” mostly surround how the facilities are actually used today. Among U.S. Protestant churches today, the trend is definitely away from constructing giant sanctuaries. In fact, average seating in a typical megachurch is surprisingly small, according to a national survey of megachurches (“A New Decade of Megachurches,” page 5) that I conducted through Leadership Network along with co-researcher Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research:
While megachurches have very large attendance figures, they often do not have massive sanctuaries. In fact, when we asked the seating capacity for each church’s largest worship area, the average in megachurches is 1,778 seats, with a median of 1,500. As in our previous surveys, it is apparent that megachurches make excellent use of multiple services to increase their capacity, and many also are multisite (one church in two or more locations). While virtually all have multiple Sunday morning services, 48% have one or more Saturday night services, and 41% have one or more Sunday night services. Megachurches hold on average 5.5 services from Friday through Sunday.
Since really big worship areas continue to make the news, I’ve compiled a list of all known Protestant sanctuaries in the United States with seating capacities over 5,000. Out of 1,650 megachurches – congregations with weekly attendances of 2,000 or more adults and children, only about 2% – fewer than three dozen – exceed 5,000 in seating capacity. Click here for an illustrated list of all churches that seat 5,000 or more, and kindly report any corrections or oversights to me at [email protected].
By Warren Bird
Megachurches are not a creation of the United States. There are far more megachurches (defined as 2,000 or more in weekend worship attendance) outside North America than inside it. I’ve had the privilege of visiting the nation’s largest-attendance church in the United Kingdom, Ukraine, China, Korea, Hungary and Singapore, among others. And in those churches, as well as those of other sizes, God is worshipped in languages parallel to the heavenly picture of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every tribe, nation, people and language” (Revelation 7:9).
In North America, are large churches primarily an English-language phenomena? No. Many English speaking churches host a church-within-a-church, such as Lakewood Church in Houston that offers three services in English led by Joel and Victoria Osteen and one in Spanish on Sunday afternoon. Others bill themselves as “one church in two languages” such as Christ Fellowship Church in McKinney, Texas, where Bruce Miller is pastor.
Just as significantly, there are also megachurches where the main language is not English. Some have ministry for English speakers and others don’t. Here are examples of the largest attendance church in North America for a number of languages:
Spanish: El Rey Jesus (King Jesus), Miami, FL, www.kingjesusministry.org, Pastor Guillermo Maldonado
Korean: Sarang Community Church (Love Community Church), Anaheim, CA, www.sarang.com, Pastor Stephen Chong
French: Eglise Nouvelle Vie (New Life Church), Longueuil, ON, www.nouvellevie.com, Pastor Claude Houde
Russian: Braytskaya Baptist Church, Sacramento, CA, www.brytechurch.org, Pastor Pavel Khakimov
Chinese: Richmond Hill Chinese Community Church, Richmond Hill, ON, www.rhccc.ca, Pastor Daniel Splett
Hmong: Saint Paul Hmong Alliance Church, Maplewood, MN, www.sphac.org, Pastor Chong Yang
We are quick to affirm the importance and strategic role of smaller churches. Many are pacesetters in evangelism, missional connections and compassion ministries. We and other researchers have much to learn from them.
But what about megachurch researchers who are not connected with Leadership Network? Do their findings square with Leadership Network’s megachurch biases? In a recent “mystery church shopper” report, megachurches fared quite well. Hard research is likewise affirming. National studies like FACT, USCLS and NCS touch on megachurches, but two others drew enough large church participants to reach significant conclusions:
1. Rodney Stark of Baylor University compared churches with attendances under 100 against those over 1,000, reporting it in What Americans Really Believe. He sought to determine whether large or small congregations provide a better religious experience – see the two infographics which highlight a number of his findings. He concludes that the “mile wide and inch deep” accusations of megachurches, taken as a whole, lack a research base.
2. Barna Research wrote “How Faith Varies by Church Size.” Its study found attenders of large churches were more likely than those engaged in a small or mid-sized congregation to give an orthodox biblical response – such as that Jesus led a sinless life, the Bible is totally accurate in all the principles it teaches, Satan is not merely symbolic but exists, God is the all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe, etc. Further, on seven of the eight behavioral measures, attenders of large churches scored substantially better than those of small churches. Activities included attending church in the past week, reading the Bible in the past week, and volunteering at their church in the past week. The average difference related to the seven behaviors was 17 percentage points.
Dave Travis, co-author of Megachurch Myths and CEO of Leadership Network, is not surprised by these findings. “Large churches and small churches are both valid expressions of Christian discipleship. But the fiercest critics of larger churches poke at them without data from those that actually attend them. Most of the data cited in this blog tends to show how literally millions of Americans find large church expressions of church life vital, renewing and life giving for their spiritual journeys,” he says. For more from Dave Travis on larger churches, see also What’s Next? A Look Over the Next Hill for Innovative Churches and Their Leaders.
Global megachurches: For scholarly analysis of why megachurches flourish in some places around the world and not in others, see Scott Thumma and Warren Bird, “Megafaith for the Megacity: The Global Megachurch Phenomenon” chapter 123 in Stanley Brunn, ed., The Changing World Religion Map, Springer, 2015.
Here is a series of articles I wrote for Outreach magazine, each profiling a megachurch in a different country. Each addresses the general question, “What can North American churches learn from large-church models around the world that are successfully and systematically reaching people with the Gospel?”
If you have suggestions, ideas, or feedback, please contact me, Warren Bird, Ph.D., at [email protected]
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