One region, fifteen places, and the church already at work in each

The state of the church, in ninety seconds

The church in this metro is older than the state itself: the oldest congregation we can count has held worship in Bastrop since 1835, the year before Texas independence. That is the oldest we can see rather than the oldest there was: we count only congregations still meeting, and only seven in ten record a founding year. It is still being planted: at least 150 of its 1,146 active congregations have begun since 2014. It is also stretched, and stretched unevenly: one congregation for about every 2,070 residents across the fifteen divisions, and in Northwest Travis one for nearly 4,880. And much of it we do not yet know: 326 congregations carry too little public information to be known well, a number that says more about relationships still unmade than about any congregation's health. Start where you live or serve: open your division's prayer guide and pray it out loud, and subscribe to the letter where we write what these numbers mean.