Ministry Insights from the Q1 2025 Unstuck Church Report
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The newest edition of The Unstuck Church Report is here!
Every quarter, The Unstuck Group compiles all the data we’ve collected to monitor trends in churches in the United States. Our Q1 report focuses on current data and trends in North American churches.
For this quarter’s report, we received survey responses from 487 churches, giving us valuable insights into current church trends. These churches ranged from 100 to over 13,000 in physical attendance for worship gatherings. The average in-person attendance of churches that participated was 938 people.
In this episode, Sean and I discuss findings from the Q1 2025 Unstuck Church Report and take a targeted look at growing engagement in a growing church, key staffing and financial benchmarks, plus additional resources from report sponsor StudioC to help drive greater engagement in your church.
EXCLUSIVE DATA & INSIGHTS
- Attendance Growth Trends
- Engagement Metrics
- Multisite Movement
- Financial Health
- Staffing Ratios
Subscribe to the Quarterly Unstuck Church Report:
This Episode is Sponsored by StudioC:
If discipleship is your church’s ultimate Why, engagement is your How. The problem is, most churches struggle to extract meaningful insights from their database, leaving leadership teams without the clear picture they need. Most church communication is simply a flood of every message to every person across every channel, leaving your people frustrated and overwhelmed with information.
With a deep understanding of ministry needs, StudioC brings the science of personalized engagement to the Church, enabling you to create personalized discipleship journeys at scale. Their two flagship software solutions – ChurchIQ and Member Engagement Solution – help your church unlock the full potential of combining rich data driven analytics with highly-targeted messaging.
With StudioC’s software, you can:
- Know the macro- and micro-level movements of your people
- Match them to their relevant next steps
- Tell them through your existing church app
See for yourself at thestudioc.org
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, your host, and I’m joined as always by my teammate, Amy Anderson. Amy, you’ve been very busy working with churches recently. Any stories worth sharing?
Amy:
Oh, always stories to share. I went totally retro circa 2020 recently, and did a strategic planning refresh on a day-long zoom call with a great church center point church in Orum, Utah. We kind of called ourselves Zoom Bees by the end of our day together. But man, what a fun church to work with. They are a young, sharp team of pastors and leaders that we actually first started working with back in the summer of 2023, helping them put together their plan for multi-site. And Sean just get this, in the past 18 months, they’ve moved on the church lifecycle from launch to strategic growth. They have grown again 18 months from 865 people in average attendance to 1,565. So basically doubled. And they’re currently growing at 35% a year, year over year. They baptized upwards of 200 people this past year. And get this, they’re reaching young families. You know, our first time kids benchmark, like first kids check-in, first time check-in. There we go. And we wanna have one new kids check-in for every average attendance we have. So if you have 300 kids over on an average weekend, you wanna have 300 new kids check-ins at the end of a year.
Sean:
Over the course of a year. Yep.
Amy:
They are three to one. Triple the benchmark.
Sean:
Oh my gosh. Wow.
Amy:
So, but here’s what I love most about this team. It’s just their compassion and their passion for the people that live around their church. Their mission is to make Jesus the center point—that’s the name of their church—of people’s lives. And that’s significant because of the unique religious culture they have in Utah Valley. So to see them winning this way is just so exciting. And now they’re getting ready to launch their second location and praying that’s gonna happen in 2026.
Sean:
Wow. That’s awesome. Way to go, CenterPoint team. I actually just worked with some friends of ours myself, who we’ve been working with since back in 2018: Upward Christian Fellowship in Flat Rock, North Carolina. And when we started with them, they really felt stuck. Then the pandemic hit right after that. But this is really a testament to Pastor Andy and his team’s leadership. They did the work on their strategy and their team during that pandemic lull. That positioned them to be as healthy as possible following the pandemic. And they have just experienced an explosion of growth in their community. I just met with them and kind of established the new initiatives as they work through their final months leading up to the launch of their first multi-site location. And it has been fun to watch their growth and development over the last six years, and I’m really looking forward to the next season ahead for them.
Amy:
I love that team, Pastor Andy, they’re just remarkable.
Sean:
Good people. Well, Amy, as you know, every quarter we crunch the numbers and analyze the data and put together the Unstuck Church report with a goal of just providing churches and our tribe and overview of the trends that are taking shape that really could impact their ministry. And on this week’s podcast, we’re gonna spend some time going through the data and highlighting some of the things that we think our listeners should be aware of.
Amy:
Yeah, that’s right. The quarterly reports, I think, at least for me, they’ve become a highlight for me, a highlight for us to read and to share. And it’s great to celebrate really the health that we’re seeing in churches, but it’s also good to call out some trends that churches need to be aware of so they can continue to lead unstuck churches. And in fact, over 15,000 leaders are now subscribed to get these quarterly reports.
And listeners, if that’s not you, please go to theunstuckgroup.com/trends to subscribe again, theunstuckgroup.com/trends. Because in this quarter’s report we had just shy of 500 churches participate, Sean.
Sean:
That’s great.
Amy:
So a shout out to those 487 leaders who took a few minutes to submit their data and these churches, Sean, they ranged from a hundred to over 13,000 people in physical attendance. And the data was captured from January 7th to January 31st of this, just past January, 2025. So, and in case you’re wondering, the average in-person attendance of all churches surveyed was 938 people. So that’s just a little backdrop of what’s making up our data.
Sean:
Yeah. Thank you to everybody who shared their data. Amy, let’s dive into it. Where would you like to start?
Amy:
Well, let’s start with the good news. I’m an optimist, Sean. This first trend is one we’ve been talking about all year, and that’s the fact that churches are continuing to grow. In fact, churches who responded to the survey had an average growth of 15% over the last 12 months. And we look back and this double-digit percentage growth actually started in the third quarter of 2022. And now we’ve seen it continue for 11 consecutive quarters. So I think it’s safe to say we are beyond a pandemic rebound for attendance.
Now, I just wanna say, of course, I believe that the more than 300,000 churches in North America are not all experiencing this kind of growth. But that’s why I love this data. All the other data out there tells a sad sack story about the church. You know, the reports that are talking about the 300,000 churches of every size and denomination. But this data is just specific to churches connected to unstuck. And it’s so encouraging to see that many of the churches who engage with us in our content, are experiencing significant increases in attendance.
Sean:
Yeah, absolutely.
Amy:
So, folks, we are celebrating the 15% average growth with all of you. Now, Sean, I can be a realist too. And I know that growth doesn’t always equal health. And while many pastors we work with don’t necessarily see their churches as unhealthy, they are feeling the pain of systems that are lagging behind the growth and ministry strategies that possibly have gotten outdated as more and more people connect with their church. So we’re gonna talk about some of that uneasy feeling that they might have in a few minutes. And I am actually glad they’re listening to that sense because I think it can be a warning sign and something that needs to be addressed. Just like if you ignore lights that blink on your dashboard, your car’s not gonna run for long. In our world, it means it can cause their growing church to get stuck. So I’ll get back to that.
Sean:
That’s a great point. Amy. We mentioned this in the report, but even with the number of churches experiencing growth, we still saw 41% of churches report that they’re in that maintenance phase of the church lifecycle. Now that’s significantly down from a few years ago where it would’ve been 60 plus percent in maintenance. So that’s a good thing, but it also speaks to what you’re saying, how health and growth don’t always go together. Amy, is there anything else that you’d like to call out from the reach trends in the report specifically?
Amy:
Yeah, I do, but going back to what you just said, I loved it when I saw those trends. You know, pre-Covid maintenance churches. The ones that are losing momentum, we’re starting just to keep people happy. All this kind of stuff. They have filled up 60% or more of that church lifecycle. If we look at all the churches who have taken it, they were 60% of the pie is what they own for as long as I can remember. And now that number being 41%. That’s just exciting. And also even more exciting is at the strategic growth churches in Q1 last year and this year are 22 and 24% respectively. Used to be around 10%. So, in other words, churches that are working, their plans are moving across back to the healthy side of the church life cycle.
Here’s some other positive news to share. Churches saw a 7% increase in the number of new people they’re tracking in their database as compared to the year before. And for those who might not know, we’ve actually shifted to tracking new names hitting the database as a more reliable way to gauge a church’s front door. So if you don’t have a well-managed reliable database, that would be a good area for you to focus on. This year, it’s been very reliable to help us identify, does a church have a front door or a back door problem?
We also saw online service engagement start to increase again after declining in last year’s report. And I think you probably agree, Sean, this is good news because it likely means that more people are checking out churches online as they consider whether to attend in person. Of course, it’s always gonna be there for our regulars, but it’s also an indicator are new people checking this thing out before they show up.
And one last thing I’d like to call out from the reach data is that 25% of all churches responding to the survey are now multi-site churches. Isn’t that crazy?
Sean:
Wow, it is.
Amy:
In fact, I remember in covid we’re like, is multi-site still a thing? A lot of people said it wasn’t. In fact, of the churches averaging a thousand or more in attendance, 54% of those are now multi-site, which makes sense, right? You need to be larger to go multi-site. So we’re seeing more and more churches embrace a multi-site strategy, and that’s likely due to the growth that they’ve been experiencing. So I think that’s exciting because we know from other research that when multi-site is done well, those churches tend to be more effective at reaching people outside the faith, more effective at developing leaders and multiplying their health into new areas and locations.
Sean:
Yeah, I agree. Great news, Amy. I love that. And we can confirm that through the work we’ve been doing over the last couple of years that churches are growing and that more churches are going multi-site. I mean, we’ve worked with many churches to develop their multi-site strategy for their first launch or sometimes for the next phase of campuses, and that’s just been a lot of fun to work on. Okay. Let’s move to the connection side of the data. What trends stood out to you there?
Amy:
Well, Sean, this is where the pain of lagging systems and outdated strategies just starts to show itself in the data. Anytime a church experiences growth, like we’re seeing in these trends, meaning they’re likely in that momentum stage growth of the church life cycle where people are just showing up, they need to reevaluate their systems and structure that support their ministry. What we’re seeing in the data is that engagement in the church in areas like serving, groups and generosity those percentages, as they relate to average attendance, they’re just not keeping pace with those growth numbers in average attendance.
So, for instance, on average, churches have 43% of their adults and students connected in small groups today. That’s down from 53% in this quarter last year. But what’s interesting is that the overall churches are reporting an increase in individuals being in groups. But because their pace of growth, overall growth is higher, that percentage of groups is not keeping up. And just for reference, the benchmark for adults and students in groups is actually around 50%. That’s what we’re shooting for.
And then if I’m talking about serving volunteer engagement has essentially flatlined in churches. And I’m sure all of our listeners were like, no kidding. Everybody feels it. This is not, we didn’t need a report to tell us this. But the churches in that survey reported a 17% increase—that’s good—in the number of people serving. But the percentage of adults and students as compared to attendance held at 35%. So that means, again, the total number of people, churches are engaging and serving is not keeping up with attendance growth.
And it makes sense because getting connected in groups, serving, giving, those are all lagging metrics. So it’s normal, but it’s still important to keep an eye on. And here’s why. If you’re seeing the same trends in your church, it’s an indicator that now might be a good time to pause and reevaluate. Do we have the right engagement steps, the right next steps when I say next steps? I mean big steps, right? Get in a group serve. When I say engagement steps, those are those smaller steps that help people become known.
And let me share an example, and we’re actually gonna get into this in our next podcast series. So we’ll give you more details than what I’m giving you today. And in fact, we’re gonna interview the gal who kind of did the redesign here that I’m gonna share on our webinar. But Orchard Church in Brighton, Colorado. They started tweaking their next steps experience, and maybe I should use my own language, their engagement kind of steps. And then how they delivered their next steps, promptings. And they, it was very small tweaks. And again, I will go into detail in our next podcast series, how they did it. But in 2023, they had 148 people take those little engagement next steps. They tweaked the process in 2024, they had 852 people take those little next engagement steps. That is an increase of 475%.
Sean:
Okay. That’s pretty good.
Amy:
Let’s play around with it a little bit, folks. Let’s try to find new ways to do this. And then if I talk about their total next steps, now I’m talking about the big ones to serve, getting in community. In 2023, they had 66 people take next steps. In 2024, they had 287 people take those next steps. That’s an increase of 334%. Baptisms also went up like 50%. So we’ll tell you more about it, but I’m just saying, if you are lagging, let’s not just accept that there’s a lag because we’re growing and it’s gonna take them time. Rather, get a team around this thing and try to reinvent, switch it up a little bit. What are some new ways we can try to help people get engaged? Because it won’t take long if they don’t get somewhat engaged that they may not stick and we wanna reach and retain these people.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s a great reminder and great example, Amy, of how looking at some of this data can give us an indicator that there’s a problem or there’s a problem on the horizon and it’s a good time to stop and reevaluate and reinvent.
Before I continue on my conversation with Amy, I recently had the chance to sit down with Blue Van Dyke, president and founder of Studio C to get his insights to some of the data related to member engagement in this quarter survey. You know, maybe you’re one of those congregations that’s tired of blasting your entire congregation with every announcement only to have them tune out completely. Our friends at Studio C help churches deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Their member engagement solution integrates with your technology that you already use to provide personalized messaging that moves people forward in their faith journey. So you can stop overwhelming your congregation and start creating meaningful connections with them. You can discover more about them at thestudioc.org. That’s T-H-E, studio, the letter c .org.
So Blue, only 44% of churches surveyed indicated that they believe their members have a clear understanding of where they are on the church’s discipleship path. Does that surprise you? If not, why not?
Blue:
No. Unfortunately, it doesn’t surprise me. In fact, a large number of the churches we’re working with have this very problem, and it seems to very consistent within them. You see, I think many churches actually have a discipleship pathway in mind. They just haven’t done a lot to tactically or consistently present that; it’s not part of the DNA or embedded in the culture of the church. In my opinion, it’s often seen more as a class or a sermon series but not something tactically they do. And the problem is, is that creates this sense of ambiguity. And you know, I’ve heard somewhere before that they said if hey, if something is a mist in the minds of leaders, then it is a dense fog for just one layer below that and utter darkness for the next layer down. So bringing clarity to the discipleship pathway is incredibly important.
The real question, I think is why, why are they not taking the time to bring this clarity to the discipleship pathway? And I think it’s because there’s this misconception that you can either focus on growth or discipleship, but not both. And I would actually argue that discipleship not only supports growth, it is absolutely the most effective and the most efficient way to get there. You know, I was in the marketplace, I was in the auto industry, and we knew we could spend about $1,200 in advertising to bring somebody new into the brand. Once they bought a product, we’d spend about $300 to engage them, to turn them into advocates. And if we did a good job on that, on average, they brought four people into the product for us. Right. So you spend 25% of the money, you get four times the return on investment. Focusing on engagement or discipleship, in my opinion, is the best strategy to grow your church.
Sean:
So you’ve said, church’s effectiveness and guiding people along this journey is directly proportional to how effectively they engage personally with them. What’s the difference for church leaders between understanding the macro and micro movements of their people?
Blue:
Yeah. Correct. The problem with communicating with people in aggregate, so mass messaging is people, right? For good or bad, we’re all different. People are at different places, and they certainly run at different paces, right? I like to think of it as our job is almost like a big giant GPS. Our job is to help move people through some spiritual life cycle. Well, let’s say we wanted to get everybody to Texas, right? And those people coming from California are gonna get very different messages than those people come from New York, right? And in fact, some of them may be walking, some may be driving, some may be flying, so they’re all gonna be running at different paces or traveling at different paces. So the types of messages we send have to be very, very unique, right? This requires us to get the right message to the right person at the right time and on the right channel, right? Not everybody uses the same median, and so we have to figure out what converts better for any particular person, right? I like to say that the best way to do this is use data to help inform the GPS to guide people along their own personal journey. Our whole thing here is we need to present the location to people where they’re currently at in their journey and give them recommended next steps for them uniquely, right? And we tend to do that with things we call icons or badges. It just shows where they’re at in the journey. And then reinforce that with really targeted personalized messages to help people take their very specific next step.
Sean:
Well, Blue, you’ve also said that churches struggle to extract really meaningful insights from their database. And most churches metrics, they fall short. That leaves leadership teams without clear picture of really what they need. Could you give some examples of the kinds of engagement data that church leaders should be expecting from those tools, and then maybe even they don’t realize they could have and what could they be doing with it?
Blue:
I think that there needs to be a change in the data that we collect. You see, our mission has stayed the same. I think our mission is love God, love people, and make disciples. That’s remained the same. But historically, we approached that with a one hour service on Sunday. Therefore, what we measured was attendance and giving on that one hour service on Sunday. Well, the mission has stayed the same, but now we really have much more of a hybrid model to getting people to love God, love people, and make disciples. We have small groups and we have serving opportunities. We have digital and we have podcasts. We have a whole bunch of other things. So what we’re saying is that now you need to start collecting that information so that you can understand the effectiveness of that.
I believe actually that the bigger issue is not in collecting the data. You see, we’ve seen that people actually have access to a whole bunch of data. It’s understanding what to do with that data. The challenge is translating the data into actionable insights. It’s something I used to say to my staff all the time. I used to say, Hey, if you knew, what would you do? Right? Knowing is only half the battle doing something with it is the other half.
So what we do is we take our reports and we dump ’em into three basic categories, what we call hindsight data, insight data and foresight data. And the hindsight data is just that. It helps us make decisions based on what has already happened, how many people are in groups, how many people are serving, how many people are giving, et cetera. But then we take the next piece of that, which is what we call insight data, and we start looking at trends between those points, right? For this certain demographic of people, how long is it typically between a first time visit and a first step. For this segment of people, what is that typical first step? And all of that should provide you insights by which you can start communicating to people. Now I know it three months in, I should send a message to 34-year-old females who are already baptized about getting into group, because that’s predictably their next step, right? And then the third group that we have is this foresight. And that’s the idea of saying, Hey, can I look at enough history of data that I can start predicting future behavior out of that data? Right? So this is really more gets in this realm of predictive analytics.
I’m gonna tell you, we worked with one church where we’re able to look at the history of people who have left the church, why they were leaving, and then communicate with people who’d looked like that. So we built predictive lookalike audiences and communicate with people who looked like that, encouraging them not to leave the church. And were able to close the back door by over 10% by just knowing who was gonna leave predictably, why we thought they were gonna leave, and pointing ’em to programs that the church already had.
Sean:
And then Blue, I just wondered your thoughts on why it’s so critical to get the right message to someone.
Blue:
I’m gonna answer this the other way around. Getting the wrong message to someone is not neutral. It’s actually counterproductive. What it says is, I don’t know you, right? Where all of this kind of got started is when I was on staff, I got an email that came in and said, Hey, hey, hey Blue, it’s group season. Don’t forget to go sign up for group. So I printed it out and I just wrote on there, I’ve been in a group for 16 years. I’ve been leading a group for the last 11 years. This email just did two things. It told me after 16 years, my church still doesn’t know me. And it told me that I can ignore every future email that comes out, right? This is why it’s important to get the right message to people.
I’ll tell you, some of them are funny. We see messages that go out where they’re inviting men to women’s group and things like that, but some of them are actually quite painful. We had a message that came in of a particular member of a church, and unfortunately her husband had just passed away and they just did the funeral at the church. And then the very next day, the comms department had an ad campaign or a message campaign going out saying, Hey, this is gonna be the best year of your life, which was a miss. So sometimes it can be funny, sometimes it can be really painful. But the important thing is to say that by how I communicate with you, I’m also indirectly talking about how much I know you and how much I care about you. So I think it’s incredibly important to get the right message to the right person.
Sean:
Well, Blue, that’s so good. And we just wanna thank you for being a part of this quarter’s Unstuck Church Report and for your insights into the data; we’re really grateful for that. Again, to learn more about Studio C, you can go to thestudioc.org. That’s T-H-E, studio, the letter c .org.
Okay. Let’s shift gears. I wanna take us to kind of look at ministry, staffing and finance specifically. Talk us through what we should know about this data.
Amy:
I feel like a broken record with this trend, but churches continue to be overstaffed. The average church in this quarter survey has one full-time equivalent, one FTE for every 53 people in attendance. And at the Unstuck Group, our research shows that healthier churches have one full-time equivalent for every 75 people in attendance. I say I feel like a broken record because this is a trend that seems to hold through every quarter. And by the way, it’s not surprising based on the amount of inquiries we get, and the work we do with churches on staffing. Many pastors struggle to address staffing challenges, even though their gut tells them something needs to change. So listeners, again, if you need help in this area, we’d love to help. I can guarantee that overstaffed churches often have staffs who feel like they’re understaffed, so it’s not an easy fix, but we’ve literally helped hundreds of churches organize their team to support the growth and develop a plan to get the right people in the right roles. We do it almost every week somewhere in the country.
So moving on so much to share, let’s take a look at a few of the financial trends. First churches reported an increase of giving to their general fund by 8%. But again, to further confirm how engagement is struggling to keep up with attendance, growth per capita giving is down to 51. And of course, you have higher attendance dividing it by a number, you’re gonna see that go down. Per capita was $60 just two years ago. So both an increase in overall 8%, but per capita dropped to 51.
But I think churches probably feel like they were prepared for a decrease because churches on average are now reporting almost eight months of cash reserves. And historically, Sean, we’ve recommended that churches have two to three months in cash reserves. So that average church is definitely beyond that. But here’s what I suspect. I suspect that many growing churches, like a couple of I’m serving right now, they’re actually saving right now so that they can expand facilities and start new campuses. So if you’re a church that has eight months or more in reserve because of those specific plans, that’s a wise move. But if you don’t have any big plans and you have eight months of cash reserves, it might be the time to use that money for some strategic initiatives to drive the future health of your ministry.
Sean:
Agreed. Well, this has been great, Amy. Thanks for guiding us through the trends and the findings from this quarter’s report. Before we wrap up today, any final thoughts?
Amy:
I guess I just wanna say this, first of all, again, thank you to the 487 churches who participated in this quarter survey. If you didn’t participate this time, but wanna be included, your church in the future one, again, theunstuck group.com/trends, and we’ll get you the survey. But here’s why I’m emphasizing this. Next quarter we’re gonna focus on data related to staffing in churches. And you all want this information. We know because you ask all the time. Nearly every church, no matter the size, has questions and challenges relating to staffing and organizational structure. You guys wanna know how you compare to other church’s staffs.
So if that’s you, then don’t just wait for the report, help us build that report. It’ll take you a few minutes to gather the data and complete the survey, but what you get out of it will be immensely helpful. I don’t think anybody else is providing this information in real time. So sign up to receive it and complete it when you get it. Again, theunstuckgroup.com/trends. No church is too big or too small to contribute to the second quarter survey, so please participate so we can have the very best data possible.
Sean:
Yeah, good word, Amy. Well, thanks for joining us for this dive into the latest church trends and data. If you’re enjoying the Unstuck Church podcast and you’d like to get resources to go along with each episode, you can sign up to subscribe to our weekly show notes email that comes out each Wednesday. To get on the list, just go to theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. And if after listening to this episode, you’re thinking you could use some outside help to support and develop a plan for long-term health and growth, reach out to us today. You can start a conversation at theunstuckgroup.com. Next week, we’re back with another brand-new episode and series. So until then, have a great week.
