Every year, Outreach magazine publishes its list of the 100 fastest-growing churches in America. Most pastors glance at it and move on. But buried in that data are patterns that show exactly what growing churches do differently.
I’ve been fascinated by the Outreach 100 for about 20 years, since I first saw it when they started publishing it. (For perspective, one of us was three years old at the time.) So we went back through what we know about the churches on the fastest-growing list to find out what they’re doing that most churches aren’t.
One caveat before we start. Growth is a good thing. We want the church around the world to grow, and if you’re a pastor or on a ministry team, you want to reach more people, grow your community, and add more small groups. But a strategy that grows a church isn’t automatically one your church should adopt. Some tactics feel a little icky, and we’d tell churches to steer clear of those. Others are great, and still not right for everyone. Something that works for a megachurch won’t necessarily work for a church of 150. A church isn’t a business, and that changes where the lines are.
The Growth Numbers, and Why They Feel Strange
Churches are growing:
- Churches have grown an average of 81% since the post-COVID low in 2021.
- Year-over-year growth is leveling off, from 19% in 2022 down to 14% by early 2026. That’s still a lot.
- 94% of megachurches reported growth from 2024 to 2025. The largest churches keep pulling further ahead.
That last stat needs context. Much of the growth at large churches is redistribution: people leaving one church for another. Only about 8% are brand-new Christians. Big churches are getting bigger and small churches are getting smaller. The water is sloshing to one side of the tub, but nobody’s adding much water.
The 81% number also feels different from the inside. In March 2020, our church averaged about 600 to 700 people. We met in a public school cafeteria, as many churches in Hawaii do, and we couldn’t meet there for 20 months. For a while, the best we could manage was a monthly Friday-night service at another church that let us use its building. When we relaunched in a movie theater at the very end of 2021, we were down to about 120 people on a Sunday.
This past weekend we had about 330. That’s nearly triple our post-COVID low, an increase of a couple hundred percent. As a pastor, I can tell you it doesn’t feel as good as it sounds, because we used to be almost twice this size. I suspect a lot of pastors feel the same: the percentage looks great, but you’re still not back where you were.
So what are the fastest-growing churches doing differently? Four things.
1. They Invest Heavily in the Next Generation
In growing churches, kids ministry grows 15% and student ministry grows 23%. Families go where their kids are thriving.
None of this will surprise you. Every church conference tells you to invest in the next generation. What the data shows is that growing churches actually spend money on it instead of just talking about it. That’s hard to do when you’re in decline and money is tight, but growing churches have figured it out.
Some of these churches almost feel like youth groups with a church attached. Their youth or young adult accounts on social media sometimes have twice as many followers as the main church page.
I grew up in Hawaii but went to ministry school in Texas for a few years, and the scale of some of the churches I visited there floored me. One had a young adult night on a weeknight that drew hundreds of people, maybe more than a thousand. I’d never seen a gathering that size in my life, and it was all Christian young adults. To my knowledge, that young adult group’s social account has more followers than the main church’s, and the main church is huge.
We’re not saying to put all your eggs in that basket. But when the youth group and kids ministry are thriving, they pull in the parents, the younger siblings, everyone. Churches used to assume you reach the parents and the kids follow. These churches reach the kids, and the families come with them.
Revival usually starts young
Every season I’ve seen where lots of people came to the Lord (I don’t want to throw the word “revival” around loosely) started with people roughly 14 to 30. Almost never with middle-aged people or the kupuna, the senior saints. Look at who Jesus called: mostly young men, maybe 15 to 25 or 30. Jesus himself was around 30 when his ministry began.
To be honest, we can’t prove causation here. Did these churches invest in young people and then grow? Or did they grow, and the excitement drew young people, who rally behind exciting things? We don’t have data to settle that. It’s probably at least a correlation.
But I’ve seen it firsthand. At the church I served before my current one, I was a youth leader, and over a few years our youth group grew dramatically, especially through summer camps. We weren’t good at social media. It was all word of mouth. Then the family ministry was completely transformed. Parents, some of them not Christians and some away from church for years, watched their kids change. So they started showing up, and they brought the little ones. What God started in the youth group spread through the whole family ministry.
Our recommendation: invest now
The science may not be settled, but there’s enough evidence to act. When I came on as executive pastor, one of the first things I did was move our youth pastor from 15 hours a week to full-time. It has paid off, and not just on Thursday youth nights. I see it in the energy on Sunday mornings. Just last week, about a dozen kids from the local football team came together because our youth pastor has been praying with them before games and doing Bible studies with them. When those guys get baptized, the 14- and 15-year-olds get excited too, and it builds on itself.
Most churches can’t afford huge facilities or themed kids’ rooms. But at minimum, look at your staffing. If your money is going toward reaching younger people, you’re probably investing wisely.
2. They Build People Power, Not Just Staff Power
Churches growing more than 10% see a 23% increase in volunteer participation. Stagnant churches see only 6%. Growing churches aren’t just hiring. They’re mobilizing.
We go back and forth on what this stat means.
One read: it’s a chicken-and-egg stat. It doesn’t necessarily show that mobilizing volunteers makes churches grow. When a church is growing and life is happening there, it’s much easier to invite people to serve. People get saved every week, there’s a buzz, and people naturally ask, “I see what God is doing here. How can I be part of it?” We see that in our church and in others.
The other read: many churches just don’t ask enough. This may partly be our Hawaiian and Asian culture, but in our experience churches ask for help less than they should. When our youth group was breaking out, it attracted great young adult leaders for teaching and small groups. But we didn’t have enough of the older uncles and aunties we needed to keep an eye on things, because some of the new kids were causing trouble. So one Sunday we asked: we need people for this specific role on youth nights. People signed up. They’d heard what was happening in youth, but it still took asking.
Where we land is that both are true. Growth makes recruiting easier, and most churches should ask more than they do.
Announcements and bulletin notes have their place, but filling volunteer roles really comes down to personal invitations. A lot of Christian leaders hold back because they’re afraid people will think they only want to use them. That’s a fine line, and we’ve seen churches err on both sides. But we think most churches are more afraid of asking too much than they are comfortable over-asking. As an executive pastor, I usually have to push my staff to invite more people, not talk them down. That’s partly because of past hurts. Like a lot of churches, ours used to lean on too few people to do too much, when the better approach is inviting lots of people to serve in small ways.
Pray about where your church falls on that spectrum.
Larger churches run leaner staffs
The data here is solid: the bigger the church, the more attendees per staff member.
- The U.S. average is about one full-time-equivalent staff member for every 60 to 70 people.
- At megachurches, it’s closer to one for every 100 to 120.
A staff of 40 sounds enormous until you remember it’s serving 7,000 people.
Having volunteers isn’t the same as mobilizing them well
There’s a difference between having volunteers and mobilizing them well. Many churches have more volunteers than it feels like, because the volunteers they have aren’t set up to succeed. Ask yourself:
- Does every volunteer know their job when they show up on Sunday?
- Do they know what success looks like that day?
- Do they know who they report to?
- Do they know their next step?
- Does their role fit their gifts, skills, and abilities?
When I visited a megachurch in Texas, its volunteers were mobilized so well that people clearly loved serving there.
Paid staff also need a shift in perspective. A volunteer isn’t a means to an end to get your job done. Our church is working through Matthew right now, and in the second half, Jesus increasingly works through his disciples. When he fed the 5,000, he told them, “You give them something to eat.” He was asking them to serve, but he was really pastoring them through that service. Serving is discipleship. Growing churches tend to understand that.
3. They Go Deep on Community First, and Attendance Follows
Growing churches are 40% more likely to use home-based groups as their primary small group model than stagnant churches.
That surprised us a little. The common perception of a megachurch is that it’s light on relationships. People slide in, sprint to their cars afterward, and don’t know anybody. Megachurches work hard to change that perception, partly because some of it is true. Plenty of people land at a large church after burning out somewhere else and just hide out for a while.
I was one of them. When I planted a church in Austin, Texas, and it failed, I spent about nine months at a megachurch. We were loosely connected to a life group, but I was tired and needed to recover, not jump back into ministry.
Large churches know how hard it is to disciple someone in one hour a week. A pastor of a 4,000-person church won’t know 90% of his people by name, and it’s hard to personally disciple someone whose name you don’t know. So they push hard on groups. Smaller churches may feel they don’t need to because everyone already knows everyone and word travels. Seeing the data makes sense of it.
Is Sunday attendance still worth tracking?
Yes, keep counting Sunday attendance. It’s easy: assign one person. Our guy uses a clicker every Sunday.
But small group participation is the better measure of church health. It’s also harder to track. Getting all 30-some of our life groups to report attendance consistently is a real challenge, and I doubt we’re unique. Having a policy and seeing it followed are two different things. Still, rapid growth in small groups encourages me more than rapid growth on Sunday mornings. Count both.
4. They Have a Clear Discipleship Pathway
This is the most striking stat of all: churches with a defined pathway from new member to mature disciple are four times more likely to report growth.
We’ve been preaching this on the podcast for years. Call people to action. Give them a step to take.
People assume large churches take a buckshot approach: so much staff and so many programs that they can offer people a hundred options. They do have more classes and ministries. But look behind the curtain and most of them have refined one specific path. First time here? Your next step is exactly this: lunch with the pastors, or whatever they call it. After that, the growth track, then a life group, then serving. The path is drawn so clearly that nobody gets confused.
Could everyone on your team say the same five steps?
Here’s a test. If someone visited your church next Sunday, could you map out their next five steps? Could everyone on your staff, and would they all give the same answer?
If not, you may have less of a pathway than you think. “It’s intuitive, I’ve been here forever and I’m the pastor” isn’t a pathway. The clarity across your team is what this stat measures.
That clarity has to reach beyond paid staff. My wife isn’t on paid staff, but she’s a big part of our women’s ministry and co-leads the women’s Bible study. When a new woman shows up at church, she’s one of the first people to say hi. Does she know the next step to point her to, beyond the Bible study? Do your key volunteer leaders? Your small group leaders? Helping people take their next step should be one of the fruits of every life group.
You need to repeat this until you’re sick of saying it, and you’ve only said it enough once people are sick of hearing it. When someone newer asks what’s next, you don’t want your leaders guessing or offering eleven options. You want the answer to be second nature.
This can feel formulaic. Where does the Holy Spirit fit in? We’re not saying to abdicate that. Pray for people. And trust that as you’ve prayed, the Spirit has guided you in building a pathway that serves the most people at your church. Leave some flexibility, too. When I landed at that megachurch as a burned-out church planter, a mandatory new believers’ class wouldn’t have been the right first step for me. But getting one clear path in place is a real key to growth.
Our pathway, on the spot
So we put it to the test on the episode: could I lay out our church’s pathway on the spot, with no notes? Here it is:
- Aloha Lunch. First-time guests are invited to a two-hour lunch to meet some of our staff and hear about the church.
- Growth Track. A seven-week course on the ins and outs of our church: what it means to be a Christian, our key beliefs, our organizational background.
- A life group. The path splits a little here. People who are newer to faith get a step focused on life change, while others go straight into a life group. We hope several new life groups form out of every Growth Track.
- Serving. From life groups, we connect people to a place to serve, whether that’s worship, youth, kids, media, or something else.
- Leading. From there, we invite people to take steps toward leading in those areas.
Success is when every staff member, key leader, and small group leader could say that just as easily.
Start With One
None of this is out of reach for a small or mid-sized church. You don’t have to tackle all four. Pick one of these and make a small course correction, and it can have an outsized impact on growth at your church.
Your Next Step
Want to know whether your church’s next steps are as clear online as they are in your head? We offer a free church marketing and website review. Our team will look at how your website and digital presence guide a first-time guest toward their next step, and send back honest, specific recommendations you can actually use. No sales pitch. Real feedback.
Turnaround is about 48 hours. It’s free for any church that asks.
More Resources
- 5 Things Growing Churches Stopped Doing (And What They Do Instead)
- The Church Growth Strategy Nobody Is Talking About Yet
- The New Outreach Playbook: What Growing Churches Do Differently
- The 4 Keys to Assimilation and Growth Track
- What Is a Megachurch? Definition, Data, and Debate
- Effective Church Volunteer Coordination: 9 Tips and Tools
