Another year, another list ...
» Christian Post: Outreach 100: Largest and Fastest-Growing Churches in America
Numbers one and two are in the same town, and it looks like a lot of the bigger churches' attendance are showing some reflections of the economy.
Topping the fifth annual list again this year was Lakewood Church in Houston with 43,500 attendants, followed by Second Baptist Church in the same city with 23,659 and then North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., with 22,557.
Overall, the combined attendance of all 103 churches was 1,128,451 which is an increase of 111,527 people from 2007.
While some of the most well-known churches still rank highest in the report, some showed a drop in attendance over the last year. Lakewood, led by Pastor Joel Osteen, saw a dip from 47,000 attendants in 2007. Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., experienced a drop from 23,500 people to 22,500, placing the megachurch at No. 4 this year.
Also, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., led by Pastor Rick Warren, went down from 22,000 weekend attendants to 19,414. Saddleback is ranked as No. 8 this year after ranking No. 4 in 2007.
5 Comments
how do they count this thing?
didn't know that lakewood have that much people...feels like its small when you're inside specially when you see people that you know all the time.
do they count the wednesday service too?
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe the attendance count numbers include every service for the week, plus childcare (which in our case is substantial). Just ballparking the numbers, that probably looks something like:
Sat - 5,000
Sun 1 - 12,000
Sun 2 - 15,000
Spanish - 7,000
Wed - 4,000
That's 43,000 right there. Not sure what the ratio is for KidsLife, but it strikes me as plausible that there'd be at least ~10% of adults in there.
Obviously, going to Wed & Saturday services provides a very different experience than Sundays.
Well, of course!!! Lakewood is the best!!!
You should let someone at Lakewood know the unsubscribe function on their web site and e-mails does not work. I have tried it multiple times and have even tried calling the church and I still am getting multiple e-mails every day.
Odd. Not sure where the process is breaking down, but it looks like the links in the email do the job so far as I can tell.