Here is Why Your Church Will Die Within the Next Five Years | by Dan Foster | Backyard Church

100,000 churches will close within a generation. Will yours be one of them?

In the next thirty years, one hundred thousand churches in the USA will shut their doors for good. This is the prediction of Rev. Mark Elsdon, author of “Gone for Good?: Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition.”

Let that sink in.

One hundred thousand churches.

And this is not just some pie-in-the-sky projection. Elsdon explained that the “100,000 figure is an estimate based on current trends in worship attendance.” In fact, research from Faith Communities Today, found the median congregation in the United States stood at 65 people, down from 137 two decades ago.

Yes, you could fit the average congregation on a single bus.

Predicting which churches will survive, and which churches will not, is a bit like reading tea leaves. However, there are certainly some quantifiable risk factors for churches backed by a raft empirical and circumstantial data. In fact, I could probably predict whether or not your church…