Thom Rainer describes the state of the church in North America based on his years of consulting with many different churches and denominations, saying, “Eight out of ten of the approximately 400,000 churches in the United States are declining or have plateaued.”[4] He includes the following in a footnote: “Of the churches for which we have data, 84 percent are declining or experiencing a growth rate below the population growth rate for their communities. The latter is defined as a plateaued church.”
