Which U.S. megachurches reported the biggest attendance declines since 2019?

1. The standout: Willow Creek’s 57% drop and its fallout

Willow Creek Community Church has been repeatedly cited in reporting as one of the most dramatic examples: Christianity Today’s reporting, summarized by a trade commentary, attributed a 57% decline in attendance to the congregation and cited subsequent personnel reductions of roughly 30% and multi‑million dollar budget cuts as the institutional response in 2022 ^[1], a concrete instance where pandemic‑era shifts and longer trends collided to force visible retrenchment.

2. Broad patterns: many megachurches fell but few published exact percentages

Analysts and commentators argue that megachurches overall have not returned to pre‑2019 in‑person levels and that many are operating at roughly half of their pre‑COVID attendance, but those are aggregated or anecdotal summaries rather than audited, named declines for dozens of specific megachurches ^{[2] [1]}. Pew Research Center’s work finds in‑person attendance slightly lower since 2019 and highlights particularly large declines among specific demographic groups (not individual churches), underlining that the trend is real even if church‑level data are sparse in these sources ^[3].

3. Which megachurches bucked the trend (and why that matters for comparisons)

Some large congregations show resilience or growth, which complicates a simple “biggest losers” list: Life.Church — led by Craig Groeschel and organized as many campuses rather than a single massive sanctuary — is described as having grown by leveraging multiple locations and digital reach, illustrating that architecture and strategy determine how declines register at the congregational level ^[2]. Reporting that highlights these outliers serves as an implicit reminder that declines are not uniform and that church structures, multisite models, and online ministries shape reported attendance changes ^[2].

4. Data gaps, methodological caveats and competing narratives

The available sources repeatedly note limits: national surveys (Gallup, Pew) document widespread drops in attendance but do not produce a ranked list of megachurches by percentage change, and industry commentaries fill the gap with anecdotes and single‑church examples like Willow Creek ^{[4] [3] [1]}. Some outlets emphasize a narrative of “peak megachurch” and structural rot in the model ^[2], while conservative think tanks and advocacy pieces attribute long‑term declines to cultural shifts ^[5], revealing differing agendas in explaining why attendance fell and who benefits from which interpretation.

5. What can be said with confidence and what remains unknown

It is certain from multiple sources that in‑person religious attendance in the U.S. dropped since 2019 and that some megachurches experienced steep declines — Willow Creek is the clearest documented case in the reporting provided ^{[3] [4] [1]}. What cannot be confirmed from these sources is a comprehensive, ranked roster of “biggest attendance declines” across U.S. megachurches because systematic, church‑level post‑2019 audits are not presented in the material at hand; available accounts rely on aggregated surveys, sector commentary, and isolated institutional disclosures rather than a single dataset that lists percentage changes for each megachurch ^{[4] [2] [1]}.

6. Implications: strategy, narrative and the politics of decline

The conversation about which megachurches lost the most attendance is as much about strategy and storytelling as about pew counts: churches emphasizing multisite campuses and digital programming (e.g., Life.Church in reporting) are cast as adaptive, while high‑profile budget cuts at legacy single‑campus churches like Willow Creek are used to argue the model has peaked ^{[2] [1]}, and broader polling reports frame the phenomenon as part of societal secularization or generational change — explanations that align with different institutional or ideological agendas in the sources ^{[5] [6]}.