Among American churchgoers, roughly half are concentrated within a small fraction — less than 10% — of the nation’s churches, according to data reported earlier this year on church attendance and size. The other half of America’s churchgoers are most likely to attend one of the 70% of U.S. churches that have 100 or fewer people in their weekly services. That’s a lot of small churches dotted across our country.
In my lifetime I’ve belonged to churches of just about every size that exists. I vividly remember one Easter morning in my childhood encountering the biggest crowd I’d ever seen at the tiny church my family attended in Maine: 40 people! I couldn’t believe it. As a younger adult, I was part of a house church, and later in life I attended a well-established church in a downtown location. It had seen better days but was still full of life, with a few hundred in attendance over Sunday’s three morning services.
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