An empirical test of church and denominational growth models, 1990--2001

This study is an empirical test of several important church growth theories that have been developed since the 1970s. It uses the most recent data (denominational records in the 1990s from the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches and the Glenmary data) and a national sample of congregations from multiple denominations to test the church growth theories. The two surveys in this study are National Congregational Survey collected in 1998 (n=1,236), and General Social Survey collected from 1988 to 2000 n=6,749).; The analysis was on three levels: the denominational, congregational, and individual. At both denominational and congregational levels, the results of this study could not support the hypothesis that the recent phenomenal growth of conservative churches was related to their religious "conservativeness". On the denominational level, a strong relationship was found between the level of organizational strictness and denominational growth. However, on the congregational level, the regression results did not support that strictness would increase a church's level of attractiveness to potential members. Rather, the most important factors to church growth on both the denominational and congregational levels were the presence and the degree of "collective effervescences" in a religious organization and the "age". Among all denominational membership growth factors, the strongest effect came from the average age of congregations in a denomination. On the congregational level, two age-related factors were related to increases in new members: the age of a congregation and the age composition of its church members. The younger (or newer) the congregation, the more likely it was to grow. Likewise, the greater the percentage of young existing members, the more likely a church was to attract new members. At the individual level, conservative churches had attracted large numbers of youths who were serious in their pursuit of religious meaning and diligent in their religious practice.; In sum, the study shows that the force behind some conservative churches' growth in the recent decades has been their vitality: the churches themselves are young; their members are young and enthusiastic; and their service and meetings are effervescent.