The Church Closings Forecast: What 100,000 Empty Sanctuaries Mean for Your Congregation

A new public television series, Christianity at a Crossroads, arrived this week with a number that has already traveled far beyond the people who will watch it. An estimated 100,000 American churches will close or be repurposed over the next decade. The coverage opened with a United Methodist pastor in Belding, Michigan, preaching a final sermon to about a dozen elderly members in a sanctuary built for a thousand. If you lead a church, you felt that story somewhere physical. The better response is to look hard at what the church closings forecast actually measures and what it asks of you this year.

The series and CNN’s report on it are worth your time, and they deserve a careful reading rather than a panicked one.¹ National trends do not close churches. Decisions, and the decisions leaders keep postponing, do. If your attendance has flattened, start with the leadership questions in The Plateau Is a Leadership Problem Before It Is an Attendance Problem, then come back here for the building and the numbers.

Reading the church closings forecast honestly

Start with where the 100,000 figure comes from. It traces to an estimate by a former research and planning executive at the National Council of Churches, who projected that roughly a quarter of the congregations now operating in the United States could close.² That is an informed projection. It is not a census of churches that have already shut their doors, and it does not tell you which churches will be on the list.

Two other numbers sit beside it. Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, which surveyed nearly 37,000 adults in 2023 and 2024, found that 62 percent of Americans identify as Christian. That is 16 points lower than in 2007, but the share has held between 60 and 64 percent since 2019.³ The long slide has slowed, at least for now.

So the honest summary is this: fewer Americans are Christian than a generation ago, the decline has paused, and a large number of churches still face a financial and demographic cliff. All three are true at once. Leaders who repeat only the first sentence sound defeated. Leaders who repeat only the second sound like they are not paying attention.

The recovery is real, and it is uneven

The most useful data for a working pastor came out this spring, and it got less attention than a dramatic headline does.

Read that last sentence twice.⁴ A rising median can hide two very different stories in the same town. One church gains forty people because three smaller churches nearby lost them. The county’s total church attendance did not change at all. The receiving church feels revival. The other three feel the wave.

This is why the forecast and the recovery are not contradictory. Growth is concentrating. Churches with capacity, clarity, and a working front door are absorbing people. Churches without them are losing people they cannot replace.

The great mismatch: when the building sets the agenda

Most closings are not caused by bad doctrine or a single bad pastor. They come from a slow mismatch between the size of the congregation and the size of what it has to maintain.

Urban planner Rick Reinhard put rough numbers on it after the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo announced 89 closings. He estimated that operating a church building runs about $7 to $10 per square foot a year, so a modest 10,000 square foot property costs $70,000 to $100,000 annually before anyone is paid to do ministry. He calls the pattern the Great Mismatch: small, aging congregations in large, aging buildings, often one roof or boiler away from closing.²

The PBS series shows what that pressure does to a leader. Christ Congregational Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, had dropped below 100 members while its sanctuary cost about $400,000 a year to insure and maintain. Its pastor described years of trimming every budget line to protect the building. The congregation finally left the building and moved into another church’s basement. With the savings they hired staff, membership stabilized, and giving recovered. The pastor’s summary was simple: the church isn’t a building, and it never was.¹

That conviction has deep roots. The first believers met in homes (Acts 2:46), and Jesus located his presence where two or three gather in his name (Matthew 18:20), not at a street address. A building is a tool. When the tool starts setting the agenda for the people, something has been turned upside down.

The question is not whether your church will feel the wave. It is whether you make your decisions before the building makes them for you.

What growing churches have in common

The series also profiles churches moving the other direction, and the common threads are almost disappointingly ordinary. Filmmaker Martin Doblmeier points to accessible parking, lively music, strong preaching, and generous hospitality toward visitors. He calls them mundane and non-negotiable at the same time.¹

A few specifics stand out.

• Children as the front door. Church of the Nativity near Baltimore draws about 800 children and youth on Sundays. The leaders bet early that if kids want to come, parents will follow. That is a strategy, not a slogan, and it is why partnering with parents belongs in a growth plan.
• Online as a real congregation. Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, has about 10,000 members and roughly 15,000 more people watching online. Doblmeier describes it as an online church with an in-person option, which is a different posture than streaming the service as an afterthought.
• Smaller rooms, on purpose. The Church Project in Texas meets mostly in homes, a deliberate return to the shape of early Christian gatherings.
• Immigrant congregations. The series features thriving churches like Korean Central Presbyterian in Northern Virginia, a reminder that some of the fastest-growing congregations in your county may not appear on your denomination’s radar.

None of these churches won by being novel. They won by being clear about who they were reaching and disciplined about the basics.

Five numbers your board should look at this quarter

National data cannot tell you whether your church is on a closing trajectory. Your own records can. There is no national benchmark that settles these ratios, so the trend line over three to five years matters more than any single year.

1. Building cost per weekly attender. Total facility costs (insurance, utilities, maintenance, debt service) divided by average in-person attendance. If this number is rising every year, the building is quietly consuming the mission budget.
2. Facility share of the budget. What percentage of total spending goes to the building versus people and ministry. Watch the direction, not just the size.
3. Seats per attender. A sanctuary that is 20 percent full feels empty to a guest no matter how warm the people are.
4. Children and young families in the last 12 months. Not on the roll, actually present. This is your future attendance, counted early.
5. Guest retention. How many first-time guests came back a second and third time. This is the clearest measure of whether your front door works.

Bring a sixth item that is not a ratio: the deferred maintenance list, with the cost of the next major replacement next to the amount in reserves. If you are one roof away, the board should know it now. An elder meeting agenda that never reaches the building is an agenda that will eventually be overruled by it.

Decide before the roof decides for you

Every church in the forecast had a season when it still had options: share the building, rent space to another congregation, relocate, merge with a healthier neighbor, redevelop part of the property for housing or community use, or close well and hand its assets to a new work. Reinhard’s account of Buffalo shows the cost of waiting. Decisions that could have been made one or two churches at a time over decades were forced all at once, under pressure, with little say for the people affected.²

So here is the decisive move. Do not argue with the headline, and do not adopt it as your story. Pull your own numbers, put them in front of your leaders, and name one building decision you will make within twelve months instead of letting a repair bill make it for you. Then put equal energy into the ordinary things growing churches do well: the parking lot, the welcome, the preaching, the kids’ wing, the follow-up. A vision your people can repeat back will carry that work further than any campaign.

The church has outlived empires, persecutions, and its own scandals because it was never the building. Your congregation may change where it gathers. It does not have to stop gathering.