Unbelievable House Church Statistics

These rosy statistics are from 2006, two decades ago. The one who reported them, George Barna, also had a "best selling" book at the time. Entitled: Revolution.

The new study, based on interviews with more than five thousand randomly selected adults from across the nation, found that 9% of adults attend a house church during a typical week. That is remarkable growth in the past decade, shooting up from just 1% to near double-digit involvement. In total, one out of five adults attends a house church at least once a month.

Projecting these figures to the national population gives an estimate of more than 70 million adults who have at least experimented with house church participation. In a typical week roughly 20 million adults attend a house church gathering. Over the course of a typical month, that number doubles to about 43 million adults.

While many religious professionals say they are unaware of such activity, it might be because the house church is in its “ramp up” phase in the U.S. One consequence is that millions of Americans are intermittently engaged in a house church, alternating back and forth between house church and conventional church. (For clarity, the survey distinguished between involvement in a house church and participation in a small group that is associated with a conventional church.) The Barna survey revealed that of those who attend a house church, 27% attend on a weekly basis, 30% attend one to three times per month, and 43% attend less than once a month. Source: barna.org

Pew Research Center states that only 33 million attend church at least once a month. Of these, about 1/3 are Catholic, leaving about 20 million total or about half the number alleged by Barna to be in house churches.

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