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Greater Austin Mission SocietyState of the City

Census County Division · Bastrop County

Bastrop

Neighbors
32,627
Active churches
29
Residents per church
~1,130

2026 edition, ACS 2020-2024 · Our church database, 2026-08-30

If you pastor here, pray here, or have given your years to this place, this page is for you.

We count 29 active congregations in Bastrop today, and about 32,627 neighbors, which is roughly one church for every 1,130 of them. That is not a scorecard. It is a description of the ground you share, and of how much of it none of you can reach alone.

Start by praying

Before the data, before the strategy, pray. We wrote the Bastrop prayer guide to be prayed out loud with two or three others, on a rhythm, across whatever lines usually keep you apart. Bring the leaders you already know. Invite one you do not.

Open the Bastrop prayer guide

The narrative on this page is from the July 2026 edition. Its figures were fixed when it was written, so they can differ from the charts and lists around it, which rebuild monthly from the live database.

Portrait

The Bastrop Census County Division is the historic and civic heart of Bastrop County, a 213.8-square-mile region spread along the Colorado River and through the Lost Pines, the western edge of the great southern pine forest that reaches no farther into Texas than this. With a population of 32,627, it is one of the mid-sized rural-to-exurban divisions of the Greater Austin MSA, and at 152.6 people per square mile it remains comparatively open country, its households gathered in the town of Bastrop itself and scattered across Cedar Creek, McDade, Red Rock, and the farm-to-market roads that thread the county. This is one of the oldest settled places in Texas. Bastrop was founded as part of Stephen F. Austin's colony, its first churches organized before Texas was a state, and that long memory still shapes the region's sense of itself even as new arrivals pour in.

The population is older and more rooted than the metro as a whole, even as it grows quickly. The median age is 37.8, a little above the MSA median of 36 and close to the national figure. Households average 2.6 persons, and there are 11,465 households across 12,217 housing units. Median household income is $87,527, above both the Texas median of $78,476 and the national median of $80,734, though roughly $13,000 below the Austin MSA's $100,431. Per capita income is $36,846. The poverty rate is 10.6 percent, a little above the MSA's 9.8 percent. Median owner-occupied home value is $315,600, well below the MSA's roughly $465,000, which has made Bastrop one of the more affordable places to own a home within reach of the Austin economy. Mean travel time to work is 35.3 minutes, about eight minutes longer than the MSA average of 27.3, the mark of a county whose workers drive into the Austin corridor each day and return home each night. The most striking number in the county's recent story is mobility. Some 17.5 percent of residents moved in the past year, well above the county's own longer-term rate of 10.8 percent and above the national figure of 12.3 percent, a sign of a region absorbing newcomers and new industry faster than at almost any time in its history. All figures in this section are from the 2024 five-year ACS release.

Race and ethnicity in Bastrop are layered by more than a century and a half of three communities living side by side. Non-Hispanic White residents are 51.1 percent of the population, Hispanic or Latino residents are 37.6 percent, Non-Hispanic Black residents are 5.7 percent, residents of two or more races are 3.3 percent, and Non-Hispanic Asian residents are 1.4 percent. Foreign-born residents are 8.9 percent of the population, notably below the MSA figure of 16.2 percent and below the county's own 13.2 percent, a reminder that much of Bastrop's growth is native-born families relocating from elsewhere in Texas rather than international migration. Veterans make up 9.9 percent of the adult population, well above the MSA baseline and consistent with the deep military roots of rural Central Texas. Bachelor's degree attainment stands at 27 percent, well below the MSA's roughly 46 percent and consistent with a workforce heavy in trades, transportation, construction, agriculture, public service, and the manufacturing now arriving in the county.

What makes this division distinct

Among the fifteen CCDs in the Greater Austin MSA, Bastrop is the one whose identity is held most tightly between deep roots and rapid arrival. It is at once one of the oldest settled regions in Texas and one of the fastest-changing places in the metro. The combination is unusual. Most fast-growing CCDs in Greater Austin are new ground, subdivisions poured on former ranchland with little history beneath them. Bastrop is old ground filling quickly, a county seat with churches older than the state itself now receiving a wave of newcomers, new homes, and new advanced-manufacturing and tech employers along its highways.

The deltas from the MSA tell that story. Bastrop is older, at a median age of 37.8 compared with the metro's 36. It is less affluent, at a median household income of $87,527 next to $100,431, and far more affordable, at a median home value of $315,600 beside roughly $465,000. Its commute is long, at 35.3 minutes over 27.3, the signature of a bedroom county whose workers spend their days in Austin. It is markedly less foreign-born, at 8.9 percent relative to the MSA's 16.2 percent, and more Hispanic by heritage than by recent immigration, at 37.6 percent over 32.2 percent. Its bachelor's attainment of 27 percent sits roughly nineteen points below the metro average, consistent with a working-class economy of trades, transportation, agriculture, and a growing manufacturing base. The composite portrait is of a rooted, working county absorbing newcomers at a remarkable pace while holding onto a memory that runs back to the 1830s.

Bastrop also carries a specific memory that few other CCDs in the metro share: fire. In September 2011 the Bastrop County Complex Fire became the most destructive wildfire in Texas history, burning much of the Lost Pines, destroying roughly 1,600 homes, and marking nearly every longtime family in this region. Bastrop has rebuilt, and the forest is slowly returning, but the memory of ashes is woven into how this town holds both loss and growth. The county's other deep root, the African American freedom colony of St. John, settled in the 1870s by formerly enslaved families who bought land and built churches that have held continuous worship for more than a century, now lies just outside this division in the newly drawn Cedar Creek and Red Rock CCD, though its story remains part of the shared history of greater Bastrop County. The gospel in Bastrop is not abstract. It is preached in sanctuaries that predate Texas independence, in historic Black congregations that have witnessed here since the 1880s, and in neighborhoods that have risen a second time from burned ground.

The people you are praying for

These are your neighbors, described as honestly as public data allows. Nothing here tells you what to do about them. It tells you who they are, so your prayers can be specific.

  • Non-Hispanic White51.1%
  • Hispanic or Latino37.6%
  • Non-Hispanic Black5.7%
  • Two or more races3.3%
  • Non-Hispanic Asian1.4%
  • Some other race0.8%

Metro share, for comparison

  • Population

    Bastrop32,627
    Austin metro2,426,592

    2026 edition, ACS 2020-2024

  • Median age

    Bastrop37.8
    Austin metro36.0

    2026 edition, ACS 2020-2024

  • Median household income

    Bastrop$87,527
    Austin metro$100,431

    2026 edition, ACS 2020-2024

  • Non-Hispanic White

    Bastrop51.1%
    Austin metro48.7%

    2026 edition, ACS 2020-2024

  • Hispanic or Latino

    Bastrop37.6%
    Austin metro32.2%

    2026 edition, ACS 2020-2024

  • Active churches

    Bastrop29
    Austin metro1,151 (metro total)

    Our church database, 2026-08-30

  • Residents per church

    Bastrop~1,130
    Austin metro~2,060 (fifteen divisions)

    Both sources

The others who serve here

You share Bastrop with congregations across 9 denominational families. Some of them you know. Most of them you probably do not, and that is the ordinary condition of a city, not a failure. We put the list here so you can start.

Drawing the fifteen divisions

Church density and the mission need

Research on gospel saturation suggests that church density is a meaningful proxy for a region's spiritual health. In his book Center Church, Tim Keller notes that a region with one church per 10,000 people sees roughly 1 percent of residents attending regularly. At one church per 1,000 people, that figure rises to 15 to 20 percent, and at one per 500, more than 40 percent attend.

These numbers matter because of what tends to happen in populations. One rough model of this, the diffusion of innovation, describes a kind of tipping point. An idea often struggles to be accepted until somewhere around 16 percent of a population has taken it up, after which it can begin to sustain and spread on its own. The analogy to the gospel is inexact, and the human heart is not a product to be adopted, so we hold the model loosely. But the concept is worth consideration and used often in gospel movements around the world. A region where regular gospel engagement sits far below that threshold may simply lack the critical mass for a movement to take hold, while a region approaching it has the numeric reality from which one can grow. When compared with Keller's ratios, church density becomes a rough way of asking whether a region sits above or below that line, and gives us a guide to how we can pray.

Bastrop's 28 active churches serve approximately 32,627 residents, for a ratio of roughly 1 church per 1,165 residents. This is a far sparser landscape than the division showed even a year ago, when the churches of the rural southwest were still counted here; those congregations now fall within the newly drawn Cedar Creek and Red Rock CCD, leaving the Bastrop division centered on the city of Bastrop and its immediate surroundings. At roughly one church per 1,165 residents, Bastrop sits in the middle range of the metro rather than at its dense end, past the threshold at which meaningful Christian community engagement tends to take root but with real room for growth as the town expands. The headline number should be read with care. Three realities qualify it. First, most of Bastrop's congregations are small, and several are historic fellowships drawing members from a wide radius of county roads, so geographic reach is not the same as gospel coverage. Second, the town's three long-standing community streams, Anglo, African American, and Hispanic, each carry their own congregational worlds with limited crossover, which means the relational fabric that would let the Church speak with one voice into this region does not yet fully exist. Third, the research picture is uneven. Many of the 28 active churches, most of all the smallest and least-connected congregations, carry too little public information to be known well, so the count says more about presence than about health. The primary need in Bastrop is therefore a question of church depth, cross-cultural connection, church planting for a growing town, and the relational unity of pastors and leaders across the communities that share this place.

29 congregations across 9 denominational families.

Serve at a congregation we have missed? Tell us, and we will review and add it.

A kingdom ecosystem

And yet the church was never meant to carry the whole work alone, and the nonprofits named just above are evidence of it. A region is rarely reached by strong congregations acting in isolation. The same Tim Keller whose density research framed the mission need earlier in this guide also described, in Center Church, what he called a gospel ecosystem, the observation that lasting gospel movements grow not from isolated churches but from a whole interdependent web of gospel work in which churches and the ministries around them each supply something the others need. At the center of that ecosystem are two movements the church herself carries, the planting of new congregations and the renewal of existing ones. Around them grows a wider set of callings that no single church can hold on its own: intercession that keeps the whole work dependent on God, evangelism to those the church has not yet reached, mercy and justice among the poor and vulnerable, faith and work that sends disciples into every corner of the economy, Christian institutions like schools that form the next generation, and leadership development that raises up the pastors and planters still to come.

None of this becomes a movement, though, until the leaders carrying these callings actually know and trust one another. The connective tissue of a kingdom ecosystem is relational, pastors and ministry leaders across traditions who pray together, share what they are learning, and labor toward a common mission rather than guarding their own corner. Where that trust is real, the parts begin to feed one another, and where it is absent, even well-resourced ministries work at cross purposes. Unity here is not a program to be launched but the fruit of a shared mission held long enough for friendship to grow.

The wider Austin kingdom ecosystem

Austin does not carry the whole mission alone. Around every congregation in this CCD sits a citywide gospel ecosystem that any church here can draw on, organized below by the same Keller categories. These are metro-wide ministries whose service area is the region rather than a single division, so the names that follow are illustrative highlights rather than a full directory.

Church networks knit congregations together across the metro, among them Christ Together Greater Austin, the Austin Baptist Association, the Church Ambassador Network of Texas, and the Diocese of Austin. Intercessory ministries keep the whole work dependent on God, including the House of Intercession, HOPE Prayer Ministry, and the Lake Travis Prayer Room. Specialized evangelism is the largest category in the metro and reaches particular fields, with campus and athletic ministries like Cru City Austin, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes across every county, Campus Renewal Ministries, and Launch Global. Justice and mercy ministries carry the poor and vulnerable, among them World Relief, Habitat for Humanity Austin, Unbound Now, and Texas Alliance for Life. Faith and work ministries send disciples into the economy, including the Faith and Work Movement, Faith Driven Entrepreneurs, the National Christian Foundation Austin, and C12 Central Texas. Christian institutions steward long-term formation, such as the Texas Methodist Foundation. And leadership development raises up the next generation of pastors and planters, through the Colson Fellows Program, New Canaan Society Austin, PastorServe, Mission Increase, and the Greater Austin Mission Society.

For Bastrop, this wider ecosystem is more a reach than a near resource. The town's own faith-forward ministry runs strongest in pregnancy care, recovery, and family support, while whole categories that other divisions hold locally, Christian schooling chief among them, have no Bastrop base at all. The citywide networks named above are where much of that missing capacity already lives. The strength to pray toward is connection, that a historic county-seat town rebuilding after fire and rapid growth would tie its congregations into the metro's education, church-planting, and leadership-development networks rather than trying to carry every calling alone.

Ministries at work here

Alongside the congregations, 4 organizations serve this division: nonprofits, Christian schools, and the wider ecosystem of ministries. On the map above they are the open rings; the filled dots are churches.

Nonprofits4 organizations

Know a nonprofit we have missed? Tell us.

From our database as of 2026-08-30. These records have not yet been through the full verification pass the congregations have, so where a record is marked location unverified, the coordinate on file is a placeholder several records share, and we have declined to put a pin on it rather than put it in the wrong place.

Every record we publish for this division, churches and ministries together, in one list.

If you want to go further

We are the Greater Austin Mission Society, and we exist to help leaders across this metro find one another. If something on this page is wrong, or if you want to meet the others praying for Bastrop, write info@missionatx.org. A correction and an introduction are equally welcome.

The full Census Reporter profile for Bastrop. How this data is gathered and verified.

You have seen the ground. Now stand watch over it. The Bastrop prayer guide is written to be prayed out loud with others.

Open the Bastrop prayer guide