Ministry Insights from the Q1 2026 Unstuck Church Report
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Ever wonder how your church’s metrics, wins and challenges compare to other like-minded churches?
This quarter’s Unstuck Church Report shows what the “Big C Church” is looking like in 2026 so far.
The data covers the biggest barriers churches are facing when it comes to growth, gives perspectives on finances, informs how well churches are helping people engage in their churches, and many other interesting, helpful learnings.
We dive into all the data of the Q1 2026 Unstuck Church Report in this episode:
- Growth Is Happening… But It’s Slowing
- Are People Actually Connecting or Just Attending?
- WHAT’S BLOCKING GROWTH: The #1 Barrier Will Surprise You
- Exclusive insights from The Church Lawyers
Subscribe to the Quarterly Unstuck Church Report:
This Episode is Sponsored by The Church Lawyers:
When ministry meets legal complexity, The Church Lawyers are in your corner.
Exclusively dedicated to serving churches, ministries, and nonprofit organizations, the firm brings specialized legal expertise that general practice firms simply can’t match. From church formation and governance to employment law, property matters, IRS compliance, crisis management, and more — our comprehensive counsel covers every dimension of ministry life. No legal concern is too big or too small. With affordable services and a membership program offering discounted legal rates, quality legal protection is accessible to ministries of every size.
Visit TheChurchLawyers.com for free resources and everything you need to get started.
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Transcript
Sean:
Before we dive into our findings in this quarter’s Unstuck Church Report, I wanna stop and say thank you to our report sponsor The Church Lawyers. When your ministry meets legal complexity, The Church Lawyers are in your corner. Exclusively dedicated to serving churches, ministries and nonprofit organizations, the firm brings specialized legal experience that general practice firms simply can’t match. From church formation and governance to employment law, property matters, IRS, compliance, crisis management and more, their comprehensive counsel covers every dimension of ministry life. No legal concern is too big or too small for them. With affordable services in a membership program offering discounted legal rates, quality legal protection is accessible to your ministry and ministries of every size. Visit thechurchlawyers.com for free resources and everything you need to get started.
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, your host here with Amy Anderson, and today we’re gonna share some of our learnings from our hot off the press. It’s still warm. If there was a printing press that we used Amy, it would still be warm literally—the Unstuck Church Report. So, in this quarter’s report, we gathered data from 336 churches. To all of you, thank you so much. From churches of a hundred people in average attendance to running over 10,000 weekly in average attendance. And actually the average church, the average of all churches was 944 in attendance. And we had churches across all denominations participate in this with us. Everything from non-denominational churches to Baptist, to Methodist, Lutheran, Pentecostal, some Assemblies of God churches, you name it. Churches in nearly every United States state. Plus our friends up in Canada as well.
Amy:
Yeah. And let me start just by thanking the churches that participated in this latest survey. I know it takes some of your valuable time to complete it. Oh. By the way, our survey winner, who went in the pool for the drawing, Jeremy Congdon from Oakwood Christian, congratulations to you for.
Sean:
Lots of Starbucks going to Jeremy.
Amy:
Lots of Starbucks going to Jeremy. But in all seriousness, your investment by taking this survey helps us not only share trends and information about church growth, but it’s also just more comprehensive than that. In fact, this quarter tells us things about the biggest barriers churches are facing when it comes to growth. It gives perspectives on finances right now, and it informs how well churches are helping people engage in their churches. And honestly, many other interesting, helpful learnings. And we couldn’t do it without you. So thank you for your participation.
Sean:
Absolutely. It is so helpful to see what the big C Church, looks like today. But I think the leaders connected to Unstuck to us appreciate just seeing how their metrics, wins and their challenges compare to other like-minded churches within this tribe that we have here at the Unstuck Group. And so let’s jump in. Amy, what’s the key finding or maybe the first key finding from this quarter survey?
Amy:
Yeah, and I wish I could share all of the findings with you on this podcast, but we’ll make The Unstuck Church available and let you know at the end of the podcast where you can find it. But Sean, I think the first key finding is this attendance is still growing strong, and it’s still happening across all sizes of churches. You know, me, I sliced and diced this data a lot of ways. And really churches of all sizes are growing. And the important learning here is at the pace is also slowing. So first off, unprecedented, 86% of the churches that took this quarter’s survey are growing.
Sean:
Wow.
Amy:
And 50% of the churches that took this survey are growing in the double digits. So they’re growing over 10% year over year. If we look at the average of all churches that took it, we’re sitting at about 14% year over year growth. And that’s fantastic. I mean, in 2017, we were at 5%. So, you know, think about that. Historically at the Unstuck Group, since we began collecting data on churches, and the really, the healthy benchmark has been five to 10%. So to be at 14% is just amazing.
And as we’ve said on this podcast, this growth is no longer anchored by returners to the church after the pandemic. You know, in my opinion, that slate has been wiped clean. I’d go as far to say that the post-pandemic rebound has leveled out. So this growth really reflects the rise in spiritual curiosity and new people, new families trying out, you know, the church. But I do want to add that softening part because I do think we need to pay attention to the change in growth patterns we’ve seen the past couple of years. So in 2022, for instance, the average church was growing at 19% year over year. In 2024, just two years later it was at 17%. And today we’re at 14%. So what it tells us is that this momentum that we have been experiencing over these past couple of years, it may not continue without some intentionality going forward to make sure we stay on top of reaching new people.
Sean:
And we’re gonna get into some of the barriers to growth that churches are seeing in a little bit, which should help churches think about where they might need to be more intentional going forward. But one thing that stood out to me in this quarter’s report was that since 2021, after churches reopened post COVID, the average church has grown by 81%. In other words, the average church has nearly doubled. Right?
Amy:
Yeah, that’s right. I, you know, I intentionally asked those questions in this quarter’s report ’cause I was curious about how have we rebounded after reopening the doors in 2021. So that was a fantastic number to look at just how God’s been growing this church. And by the way, you know, this is all about living on mission. So a couple other things to share in this area, decisions to follow Jesus are at an average of 10% of in-person attendance. And again, that’s a solid number because, you know, we love math here at the Unstuck Group. That means if your church is running 500, that means 50 people, right, a year are making that decision. And churches, in the data, Sean, that we’re, over a thousand inside that number actually jumps up to 11%, excuse me, over the year. And those numbers, they are significantly higher than the reports we hear out of other research groups. And again, it again supports that churches connected with our tribe and the mindset that mission trumps methods, they just continue to see extraordinary results and we have to just make sure we celebrate that.
And then lastly on this one, on the digital side of reaching people, online engagement continues to grow. In fact, the average online views are up 25% year over year. For all the churches that took the survey, and the total contacts in the church databases are up 12%. So I think what this is telling us is that churches are getting better at tracking and connecting with people. And as I wrote in the full report, I really believe the next step for most of us is really honing in on now that we’re collecting the data: What are we gonna do with that to really connect people who are new to our churches?
Sean:
Well, that’s all really good news. but I wanna go back to what you said just a few minutes ago related to the softening growth trends. You mentioned that churches will need to get intentional about future growth, not just assume that it’s gonna continue to happen the way it has been the past few years. And I think part of that intentionality is actually connected to the church’s engagement pathway. The systems that help people get connected beyond just attending the weekend services. So what did we learn in the survey just about engagement?
Amy:
There’s some great news here as well. About 51% of church attendees are now in some form of small group or community gathering. And that’s right at the benchmark for us, 50 to 55%. And that has come back strong over these past few years. So roughly half of our attenders are connected in groups. And that’s remarkably consistent, again, across all church sizes. Whether you’re a hundred people or 10,000, half of the average weekly attendance in a group just prevailed across all different sizes.
And then let me talk about volunteering. You know, Sean, this has been the slowest engagement area to rebound since reopening after COVID. Time became that bigger commodity, but we actually saw some good news here too. Volunteering, the average now is up to 42%. And in the survey, how we ask that, is we say, how many students and adults are engaged in serving in your church at least one time a month? And then we ask them to take out the duplicates. So Sean, if you serve in three areas, we wanna count you just once. So this data is saying about four in 10 people are now serving on a team at least monthly. And that is up from 35% just a year ago in our Q1 report last year. So I think that’s great progress. And we know as we’ve served churches, everyone was working on that and it seems that the dial seems to be moving again.
But here’s a metric that continues to concern me a little bit, and it’s the volunteer leader ratio. So the average volunteer leader ratio in this quarter’s report came back at 17 to one, meaning on average a church has one volunteer leader for every 17 people that attend the church. And at larger churches it actually stretches to 21 to one. Now last year that number was at 13 to one, so we’ve actually lost some ground. But, we also are dealing with churches that are growing and it takes a while for people to get engaged. So we might have a growth challenge that’s dragging this down, but regardless, this continues to be a challenge for churches.
And the challenge, it’s really an equipping problem. It reflects that churches are still struggling to effectively engage volunteers who lead other volunteers into their ministry teams. And you know, the good news, Sean, is that this is a solvable problem. It’s not easy. It’s solvable though, and we’ve talked about it a lot on the podcast this past year. But I just hope it kind of raises the alarm bells again, again, our win as ministry leaders, it’s not to do the ministry, it’s giving it away to the people God has in our seats. It’s how they grow and it’s how they engage their spiritual gifts in the life of the church. So I hope this raises a question with your teams, just how are we doing compared to that average right now of 17 to one?
Sean:
And of course, taking steps in generosity is also part of the engagement journey giving is or should be part of our discipleship process. So I thought there was some good news in regard to giving as well.
Amy:
There was. I’m actually curious, Sean, you’ve seen the report. What stood out to you in this area of generosity?
Sean:
Well, giving is up actually 9% year over year. And that’s healthy. Last year the number was 8%. So we saw a little bit of growth there. You know, people are being generous and the larger churches, churches over a thousand are seeing the biggest giving increases at 10% right now. But here’s the tension. The most common way churches describe their financial position wasn’t thriving. It was somewhat constraining, meaning, you know, we can keep the lights on, we can run our general ministry plays, but we’re being cautious with our finances. And we’ve heard that from churches that we’re working with. It’s not like their finances are unhealthy. But they feel constrained when it comes to funding their dreams and the vision that’s out in front of them.
Amy:
Well, we heard that on our call with our consulting team, that we had this past month. Many of our consultants, for our listeners who don’t know, they are executive and lead pastors. Unstuck is kind of their side hustle. And we do that strategically because we want our team up to date with what churches are facing today. And if you remember, a couple of them weighed in on capital campaigns that they’re running right now to fuel, their dreams, as you said. And they really aren’t seeing the results they had expected. And so we had a conversation around it. And that’s something we’re kind of keeping our eyes on trying to learn. If that’s a trend out there, like where people are not as generous in this season. Again, these are growing churches, so it could be because we have a lot of new people. But yeah, that just came to mind.
Sean:
Well, to look at it from another angle, the survey actually shows that per capita giving goes down as the church gets bigger. You know, smaller churches under 200 see about $65 per person per week. Churches over a thousand, that dips down to only $49 per week, and that’s a 25% drop. So bigger doesn’t mean more generous per person. To add to that, the fastest growing churches in the survey, those growing by 20% or more year over year, they reported a per capita giving at $45 per person. And that makes sense because when you’re growing, you experience that giving lag.
Amy:
That’s right.
Sean:
New people, one of the last ways that they’ll engage with your church most likely is to give financially.
Amy:
And back to that capital campaign thing I just mentioned, it’s likely the fast growing churches that are out of space. And they’re leveraging those campaigns to make room, only there’s so many new people that it makes it harder to get a great commitment from people that’s right out of the gate. So one of the churches was saying, yeah, we started slow, but it was amazing as we moved through the campaign, people started getting on board as we started to break ground and do those things. But I think that’s gonna be a future podcast for us, just how are capital campaigns going in this season.
Sean:
Yeah. Well, that’s a great segue just into the next conversation. In the survey, we asked churches to share what their biggest barrier to growth was in this season. Amy, what we find there.
Amy:
So every church in this survey was asked, “What best describes your biggest barrier to growth right now?” And we gave them options and of course the other button. But Sean, the number one issue for growth by a landslide was actually space issues. 35% of churches said they were struggling to open up seats at optimal times. That’s one in three churches that took the survey. Now, let me say this clearly, this is a good problem, right? If your biggest issue is that too many people are showing up, like, praise God. But it’s still a real barrier. Ask any of the churches we’ve been working with on this. You know, people don’t invite their friends if there’s nowhere to sit. Families don’t come back if the kid’s space is overflowing or looks chaotic because of all the growth. But maybe I’ll say it this way, space constraints, they kind of silently cap your growth. So it’s a real issue and it’s one we saw with so many of the churches we serve this past year. And because of that, this one actually didn’t surprise me. Clearly space and service times was something we talked about quite a bit on this podcast the last 12 months.
But here’s the one that did surprise me, Sean. The second biggest barrier, again, self-assessed by the church leaders who took the survey is invite culture. 20% of the churches said that their people have cooled to inviting friends and family to church. And this was the biggest barrier for churches that were growing by less than 5% year over year, if we segment by growth. The churches that were growing by less than 5%, this was their biggest barrier. And you know, this Sean, when invite culture cools off, churches turn inward, they lose momentum and move into a maintenance mode, you know, phase of the church. So I just think this barrier should concern us.
Sean:
And Amy, when you add up all of the internal barriers, like lack of vision, lack of alignment, or resistance to change, you get roughly 30% of churches dealing with problems that are inside the church, not actually outside the church. So here’s the insight that jumped off the page for me. Growing churches have outward facing problems, like they’re running out of room. Declining churches have inward facing problems, like their people won’t invite, their leaders aren’t aligned. Their vision for the future is unclear. And if your biggest barrier is something inside your church body, you know, treat that as a warning sign. It’s time to tackle those issues, those kind of solvable internal challenges.
Amy:
Yeah. Well, I’ll make a shameless plug. This is what the Unstuck Process tackles in 90 days. You have a plan to begin the work of getting your church out of a maintenance mode and back to a place of health. Now, the plan takes 90 days to create. The work takes a couple of years to create. But that’s actually why I say don’t wait. There’s not a silver bullet to turn these internal issues of alignment, lack of vision or resistance to change. It takes time to navigate those things. But that’s why I say if you’re experiencing it now, start your plan to get out of that and getting back to a place of health.
Sean:
Yeah. And our process helps growing churches also create plans that help them not to get stuck as they live out this season of momentum. That they’re in. You know, you talk to any fast growing church and they will tell you when their stuckness is really set in. You know, we help churches get ahead of that growth and to build the systems required to kind of move from momentum growth into what we call strategic growth and ultimately the sustained health phase of the church lifecycle. And Amy, in the last two weeks, I’ve worked with two of these churches that are growing double digit percentages. Running outta space, need more leaders. These are all the challenges that we’re working on. And what we’re trying to do is get a plan to get out in front of those churches. And that work has been really fun.
Amy:
We’re such church nerds, Sean. We both like start talking faster and louder as we get into like, let’s turn it around.
Sean:
Unashamedly. Yeah, absolutely.
Amy:
By the way, 14% of churches said they’re experiencing no major barriers at all. They’re reaching their community and don’t feel stuck.
Sean:
I love that.
Amy:
So it is possible to get to that place, but there are a lot of barriers on the way up. There’s barriers when we’re losing momentum, but there is that sweet spot where we can live and thrive.
Sean:
Before we wrap up today’s conversation, I had a chance recently to sit down with David Middlebrook from The Church Lawyers to ask him about some of the report’s findings related to salary and compensation as well as risk management.
So, David, the survey found that only 51% of churches who participated use a professional survey analysis for senior and executive pastor pay. The difference by church size is pretty telling: 74% of churches running a thousand plus used professional analysis, but only 31% of churches under 200 do. How does that leave the churches exposed to risk?
David:
In terms of compensation, the Internal Revenue Service and all of the cases and the guidance and regulations related to it focus on this one word and that is reasonable. And to determine what is reasonable according to the directions given to us by the service, we have to look at comparability data. And so to your question, why are smaller churches using surveys and larger churches are using paid professionals? I think there’s several reasons for that. Number one, the smaller churches are going to traditionally have smaller salaries. They have smaller staff. And much of that information, although not required to be provided by a church, it gets published and it gets it, it becomes, you know, comparability data.
But as the church grows, the facets of the church and its ministry and its leadership and the different positions, become unique. And it’s difficult to find those comparability data, without going to a professional. Like in our firm, for example, we keep track of every study that we’ve done over the course of years. And so we can look at, not only based upon the size of the church attendance wise or the size of the church from a revenue perspective, we can look at it denominationally, geographically, and many, we slice the pie in many, many different ways. And so I think, and the short answer is, is that, you know, it’s just a more complex, unique animal as a church grows, as opposed to when they’re smaller.
Sean:
57% of churches said that they had not completed a legal or risk management audit in the last three years. And that number actually stayed consistent across all sizes. How often do you recommend churches do that? And what are a few of the most important reasons to get it done?
David:
First of all, I have to tell you the 57% number is surprising to me. And, actually, I would’ve thought it would’ve been much higher. And why is that? It’s because churches and ministries are busy, doing what the Lord’s called them to do. And there’s so many aspects to ministry life, and it’s sometimes hard to stop and to take pause and to assess where your relative strengths and weaknesses are from a legal perspective and otherwise. And so, I always tell folks, first of all, don’t get caught up on the percentages and don’t be too hard on yourself because we understand at The Church Lawyers, we understand you’re busy.
But to the specific question, I think, and we do something for people that are part of a program we have called the Church Lawyer Program, the TCL program, we do something on our nickel, and that is, we call it a legal snapshot. It’s not an audit ’cause I don’t think those words are really good together with lawyers. Those are financial audits. It’s not an audit, legal audit, it’s a snapshot. But we look at your insurance policy deck pages and your bylaws and your articles and just, you know, all the stuff, policies, procedures, just to get a baseline with new clients to know where they are. So what I think is, and I encourage folks that become new clients, new TCO client members, you go use that process because we’re gonna give you a checklist and we’re gonna educate you during that first round of what you need to be looking at. So then, then you have the skills and you know, you know, ’cause it can be a daunting task to say, and, you know, well go look at everything.
Well, what’s everything, okay? And how do I do this systematically? And how much time is it gonna take? For example, I tell folks at a minimum, you should get your bylaws out. I encourage ’em to do it between the holidays, after Christmas and before New Year’s or whatever. Just get it on your calendar. Get your bylaws out and ask yourself, are these bylaws really who we are? Or do they need to be changed? Well, if you incorporate that into a process and say, I also need to look at the deck pages. Do we have sufficient insurance coverage? What about our policy? When was the last time we updated our employee handbook, our volunteer handbook? See, it becomes a systematic thing. And so, I would say, you know, somebody in the organization needs to do it, like once a year. And, not that you have to necessarily fix it, but it begins a process. It doesn’t have to be an event, but it begins a process of if stuff needs to be addressed, it can be, addressed in such a way that you can have the peace of mind that we want you to have
Sean:
As churches, add staff, go multisite or even expand their digital footprint. Complexity goes up, right? And risk goes up with it. How do you see churches moving forward without a clear understanding of where the organization is exposed?
David:
That’s a really great question. And, unfortunately, it’s a very broad question that I can’t give you just a short answer to. For example, you know, if you have a church in Oklahoma and you’re gonna do a satellite church in Texas, you’ve literally moved to a whole nother set of laws and requirements, et cetera. So how, how are you going to, how are you gonna do that? And you have state laws, you have federal federal’s, great. ’cause it’s, you know, the federal system, it applies everywhere in all the states and territories of the United States. But each state has some very distinct differences, sometimes just nuanced differences. So you have to be alert to that. And, that’s one of the things, you know, we really enjoy, in our practice at The Church Lawyers is that we get to be involved in so many different jurisdictions and so many different issues that it becomes kind of a reflex for us. You know, we know if you’re from California, hey, here’s some set of things we gotta look at. Or you’re New York or you’re wherever.
So, I think that really almost need to sit down and think about where are we going as a church? What is the model going to be? Is this one church under one legal umbrella or these individual churches with separate corporations and separate boards, et cetera. There’s just beginning there you need to be thinking about it. And it’s not, frankly, it’s not an easy task. Somebody that really understands business, understands operations, understands risk management, inside of your organization needs to be partnered with people on the outside of the organization so they can kinda help them get that done. And ’cause growth is a great thing, unless you grow outside of where, you know, what do they say fall? You get lean too far into your skis or whatever and you stumble. And so you’ve gotta be careful. But at the same time, we want to encourage you and tell you that you don’t have to go alone. There’s people that’ll help you get it done.
Sean:
All right. Well, Amy, there’s obviously so much in the report we can’t get through all of it today. So we’re gonna wrap up today’s conversation. Any other survey results that stood out to you before we do?
Amy:
Yeah, one other one, Sean, the average church board or elder team came in at an average of eight members, and they have two to three standing committees. But you know, as I scrub this data, in fact, some of the churches that participated got emails from me. I’m like, do you really have 20 board members? Do you really have 50? Do you really have? And they do. Some of them do. And so those outliers can kind of skew those numbers a little high. And then of course there’s some that have zero, and that’s another problem as well.
But 58% of the churches that answered the survey have boards containing eight or fewer members, which is right in line with what we recommend at The Unstuck Group. I think we kind of say four to six, but no more than eight. And here’s why. If you took the survey, or maybe you didn’t, if you have boards that are larger than eight, and I know some of you do because of different things within your denomination, but when governments and committee structures get too large, it just inevitably slows down decision-making; it diffuses accountability. And it actually can be one of those internal issues that are causing some of the stuckness. So there was nothing really like “wow” about seeing that on our chart in our report, but I just wanted to highlight that, you know. Let’s keep working on that if we have some larger boards.
You know, overall I just think, Sean, there was so much to celebrate in this report. And as I said before, I hope this data helps churches think through what next steps they might need to take to either stay or become a healthier growing church. And I also hope churches pay attention to those yellow flags that we talked about, like growth softening, and that cooling invite culture across the board. I think it’s a nice whisper for us to be paying attention to as we go to lead our church through this year.
Sean:
Well, thanks listeners for joining us as we dive into the latest church trends and data. Thanks again to all the churches that participated in this quarter survey. I mean, your input, your help, and your willingness to sit down and share your data helped so many churches across the big C Church. So thank you. We’re really grateful.
And if after listening to this week’s episode you’re thinking, yeah, we could use some outside help on some of these issues. We help churches on a weekly basis navigate things like those challenges that come with growth, determining how to add services, determining how to add locations, and how to go multisite. We also help churches with the symptoms of decline, that lack of invite culture and some of the other areas that those churches are feeling and experiencing. So if you’d like to start a conversation, you can reach out to us today at theunstuckgroup.com. Next week, we’re back with another brand new episode of the podcast. So until then, we hope you have a great week.
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