The Church Today
Where the church is breaking, and where it is gathering. Both are true.
This page tries to look honestly at the one church Christ began, as it actually stands today: scattered into many bodies, and at the same time gathering by the multitude. It is not written from a single camp. It traces the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, the Protestant denominations and where they have divided, and the revivals across the nations, and it holds the splits and the gatherings in the same frame, because both are where the church is right now.
For the long story behind this present moment, see The Church, One Story: a fair, connected timeline of the whole church from AD 70 to today, each era opening to a sourced deep dive.
Last updated June 2026. Every claim below is sourced from a trusted outlet and linked inline; current developments are dated.
Church tracker
Each card carries a recent development, fetched from a trusted source and cited inline. A continuously updated live feed is planned for Phase 2; nothing is posted here until it can be sourced.
Vatican & the Pope
The era opened with a death: Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit, who led the church from 2013 on the themes of mercy, the poor, and migrants, died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025, at age 88. The conclave that followed elected Robert Prevost, a Chicago native and longtime missionary in Peru, in May 2025 as Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (May 2026), warns against letting artificial intelligence dominate humanity, calls modern just-war thinking "outdated," and urges that lethal decisions never be handed to machines. He has pressed an insistent peace message: in an April 2026 Sunday appeal he urged ceasefires in Ukraine, Lebanon, and Sudan, "I appeal to the parties in conflict to cease fire and to seek with urgency a peaceful solution." In his first year he has centered the papacy on peace, unity, and "synodality" (a listening, participatory church), drawing on his Augustinian conviction that "truth does not come from one individual, but rather through dialogue among many," and pointedly meeting across the church's divides, both the progressive Jesuit James Martin and the traditionalist Cardinal Raymond Burke.
Sources: CBS News, National Catholic Reporter, EWTN Vatican, USCCB, Death and funeral of Pope Francis.
The Orthodox Church
The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops reports an "accelerated growth" of converts in the U.S., which "some have even called a flood," especially among the young (ages 15–30), straining parishes for clergy (Nov. 2025).
Nations & faith
Some states write the faith into their founding law. Zambia's constitution declares "the Republic a Christian Nation while upholding a person's right to freedom of conscience" (carried into its 2016 edition); and in 2017 Samoa amended its constitution so Article 1 reads "Samoa is a Christian nation founded on God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit." And in the Muslim Gulf, the UAE opened the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, a mosque, a church (St. Francis), and a synagogue side by side, growing out of the 2019 Document on Human Fraternity signed on Pope Francis's UAE visit.
Sources: Constitution of Zambia, Constitution of Samoa (2017), Gulf News.
Votes & splits
Newest: on June 10, 2026, meeting in Orlando, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, passed the "Truth and Unity Amendment" (sponsored by Albert Mohler Jr.) barring cooperating churches from affirming a woman "in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, such as preaching to the assembled congregation." The vote was 6,028 to 2,026 (74.66 percent), clearing the two-thirds bar that earlier attempts had missed. It is the first of two required votes and must pass again at the 2027 meeting in Indianapolis to enter the SBC constitution. Fuller account, with the confession behind it, below.
Sources: Religion News Service, The Christian Post; see "Denominational votes & splits" below.
Revivals & renewal
The hunger is real, and easily overstated. Christianity Today (April 2026) reports that 71% of young adults say there is "something spiritual beyond the natural world," and points to thriving Gen-Z congregations even as institutions shrink. But the news reports went beyond the data: the widely-shared "Quiet Revival" (Bible Society, 2025) claimed UK church attendance among 18-to-24-year-olds had quadrupled, from 4% to 16% between 2018 and 2024; the report was withdrawn in 2026 after the pollster YouGov found the figures flawed, and official attendance records still show decline. The honest read: documented spiritual openness, not a measured boom.
Source: Christianity Today, “The Revival That Wasn't” (Apr. 27, 2026), reporting on the Bible Society's 2025 “Quiet Revival” report and its 2026 withdrawal.
Attendance & belief
The long decline has slowed. Pew's 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study finds 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christian (40% Protestant, 19% Catholic, about 3% other Christian), down from 78% in 2007 and 71% in 2014, but holding between 60% and 64% since 2019; the religiously unaffiliated, long rising, have leveled off near 29%. Weekly worship sits lower and is still slipping: Gallup finds about 30% of Americans attend nearly every week in 2021–2023 (21% weekly, 9% almost weekly), down from 42% two decades earlier, with Catholic attendance falling from 45% to 33%, even as Muslim, Jewish, and Latter-day Saint attendance held or rose.
Sources: Pew Research Center, 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study (Feb. 26, 2025), Gallup, “Church Attendance Has Declined in Most U.S. Religious Groups” (Mar. 25, 2024).
The history of the splits
Christ prayed that his people would be one. The story since has run the other way: one church becoming many. This is not written to score points against anyone, but to see plainly how far the family has scattered, and to feel the weight of the prayer in John 17. The major fracture lines:
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c. AD 33 · One church
At Pentecost the believers "were all with one accord in one place" (Acts 2:1). For its first centuries the church, though spread across the empire, understood itself as one body holding one faith.
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451 · Chalcedon and the Oriental Orthodox
The Council of Chalcedon defined Christ as one person in two natures. The churches that could not accept that wording, the Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, and Syriac churches, separated and remain distinct to this day as the Oriental Orthodox.
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1054 · The Great Schism
After centuries of growing distance over authority and the wording of the creed, Rome and Constantinople excommunicated one another. The one church of the first millennium became two: Roman Catholic in the West, Eastern Orthodox in the East.
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1517 · The Reformation
Luther's protest against indulgences opened a century of division in the West: Lutheran, Reformed (Calvin), Anabaptist, and Anglican churches each went their own way, and the principle of dividing over conscience went with them.
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1600s onward · Into the thousands
Baptists, then Methodists, then Pentecostals (Azusa Street, 1906) and countless others followed. The dividing did not stop; it accelerated.
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Today · How many?
The trend is measurable. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity counts the world's Christian denominations and rites growing from about 2,000 in 1900 to 13,100 in 1970, 31,000 in 2000, 44,700 in 2020 and about 50,000 today, with 64,000 projected by 2050 (the 2025 edition of the table, the same one used on Every Line Drawn). That number is real but easily misread: it counts a body once per country it operates in, so a single global communion present in 100 countries adds 100 to the tally. It measures organizational scatter across borders, not 45,000 separate gospels. The honest takeaway is not a precise count but a direction, and the direction is multiplication: very far from the one flock of John 17. And the scatter is wider than the disagreement: counted question by question, the divisions come to about sixteen, and none of them is about how a man is saved. The tally is on Who Believes What.
Denomination counts from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (Gordon-Conwell), “Status of Global Christianity, 2026” (1900–2075 table, line 34). The fracture dates: the Council of Chalcedon, 451 (Christ "in two natures"; the Oriental Orthodox declined the formula); the East–West Schism, 1054 (mutual excommunications between Rome and Constantinople); and the Reformation, 1517 (Luther's Ninety-five Theses; Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, and Anglican streams).
More in this section: The Church & Creation Today. Related: Upon This Rock on Peter, the Fathers, and what a first chair is, Scripture Alone, and What That Was Meant to Mean. Connected on this site: Loving the Church You Disagree With, Covenant, and The Creeds, the small floor where Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant still stand together.
Denominational votes & splits
The detail behind the tracker card. Each item below, including the June 2026 SBC vote, is drawn from a source actually retrieved and quoted, never asserted from memory.
Southern Baptist Convention, women in the pastorate
The SBC's confession of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (Article VI), holds that "While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture." Acting on that doctrine, on June 10, 2026 at its annual meeting in Orlando, the convention passed the "Truth and Unity Amendment," sponsored by Albert Mohler Jr., by 6,028 to 2,026 (74.66 percent), clearing the required two-thirds. It bars cooperating churches from affirming, appointing, or endorsing a woman "in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, such as preaching to the assembled congregation." This was the first of two required votes; it must pass again at the 2027 annual meeting in Indianapolis to enter the constitution. Earlier attempts in prior years had fallen short of the two-thirds bar. Sources: The Christian Post, CNN, Religion News Service, and the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, Article VI.
Women in the pulpit: the big divide
Step back from any single vote and a clear fault line appears. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches do not ordain women; most mainline Protestant bodies (Methodist, Episcopal, ELCA Lutheran, PCUSA) do, and have for decades; and evangelicals are split. A 2021 Lifeway survey captured it: asked whether a woman could be senior pastor of their church, 94 percent of Methodist pastors said yes, with Pentecostals at 78 percent and Presbyterian/Reformed at 77, but only 47 percent of Lutherans, 43 percent of non-denominational, and 14 percent of Baptist pastors agreed, mainline 76 percent versus evangelical 44. Source: Lifeway Research.
United Methodist Church, LGBTQ clergy
At its 2024 General Conference, on May 1, 2024, the UMC removed its ban on ordaining LGBTQ clergy, in place since 1984, by a vote of 692 to 51, and ruled that clergy and churches are not to be penalized either for holding or for declining to hold same-sex weddings. Source: UM News.
Global Methodist Church, the conservative counterpart
As the UMC liberalized, conservative congregations formed the Global Methodist Church, launched May 1, 2022, over the same disputes on same-sex marriage and non-celibate gay clergy. It has grown fast: about 6,000 congregations by October 2025 and, as of early 2026, more than 7,000 congregations with at least 4,500 pastors. Source: Global Methodist Church.
The wider Methodist family
Behind the UMC's troubles is a much larger tree. The World Methodist Council represents some 80 Methodist and Wesleyan churches with more than 80 million members across 138 countries, all descended from the 18th-century revival of the Anglican brothers John and Charles Wesley. It is among the larger Christian communions, and like the rest of global Christianity, much of its weight now lies outside the West, in churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Uniting Church. Source: World Methodist Council.
Lutheranism's center of gravity moves to Africa
The same southward shift has remade Luther's own tradition. The Lutheran World Federation counts more than 77 million members in 148 churches across 99 countries, and its largest member church is no longer European but the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus (10.4 million, up 18 percent in two years), followed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania (7.9 million). African Lutheran membership grew while Europe's declined, the Church of Sweden slipping even as Ethiopia surged. Source: The Lutheran World Federation.
The Baptists, counted (partly)
Baptists are one of the largest Protestant families, and characteristically hard to total because they prize local-church independence. The Baptist World Alliance gathers an estimated 53 million Baptists in 283 bodies across 138 countries, about half the world's Baptists and the seventh-largest Christian communion. But it undercounts: the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest single Baptist body, left the alliance in 2004, so the worldwide Baptist total likely tops 100 million. Even counting the church is a study in Baptist independence. Source: Baptist World Alliance.
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the definition of marriage
The 221st General Assembly approved a marriage amendment in 2014; a majority of presbyteries ratified it on March 17, 2015, redefining marriage in the constitution as "a unique commitment between two people." The change took effect June 21, 2015. Source: Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
The Reformed family, worldwide
The PCUSA is one strand of a much larger Calvinist family. The World Communion of Reformed Churches, formed in a 2010 merger and tracing its roots to 1875, gathers about 100 million members in 228 denominations across 108 countries, Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregational, Uniting, and Waldensian churches descended from John Calvin's Reformation. It is the largest association of Reformed churches in the world and one of the larger Protestant communions. Source: World Communion of Reformed Churches.
Anglican realignment
Conservative Anglicans founded the Anglican Church in North America on June 22, 2009, out of the Common Cause Partnership and aligned with the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON). Unlike the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, the ACNA is not a member province of the Anglican Communion, a realignment that now runs through the wider Anglican world. Source: Anglican Church in North America.
The global Anglican rupture
The bigger Anglican story is global. After the Church of England agreed to bless same-sex relationships in 2023, the conservative GAFCON and Global South provinces, which represent a large majority of the world's practicing Anglicans, mostly in Africa, declared in the Kigali Commitment that they would no longer recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury's authority. In October 2025 they moved to "reorder" Anglicanism into a rival "Global Anglican Communion." As Rwanda's archbishop put it, "We have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion." Source: Christianity Today.
How big, and how southern, the Anglicans are
The stakes of that rupture are large: the Anglican Communion is the third-largest body of Christians in the world, after the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, with around 80 million members across more than 165 countries. And its center of gravity has shifted decisively south: as one Anglican body puts it, "the 'average' Anglican is a young woman from Sub-Saharan Africa," with the largest single Anglican church now in Nigeria, not England. Source: Anglican Church in North America.
Africa's own churches
Not all of African Christianity was planted by Westerners. The African Instituted (or Initiated) Churches, founded by Africans from the early 1900s, blend Christian faith with indigenous culture, music, dance, and a strong emphasis on healing, prophecy, and the Spirit. They are self-governing and self-supporting, free of any foreign mission board. The largest include the Kimbanguist Church in the Democratic Republic of Congo (about 5 million) and South Africa's Zion Christian Church (millions more); by the World Council of Churches' estimate, AIC adherents number over 80 million, a major force in their own right. Source: World Council of Churches.
Back to Nicaea: a step toward healing
Against all the fracturing, a sign in the other direction. On November 28, 2025, Pope Leo XIV and the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met at Iznik (ancient Nicaea) in Turkey to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea (325), where the church first confessed the creed it still shares. Together they recited the Nicene Creed and pressed for unity; Leo urged Christians to "overcome the scandal of the divisions," saying "the more we are reconciled, the more we Christians can bear credible witness to the Gospel." It is the John 17 prayer answered, in part, by the heirs of the oldest split. Source: America Magazine.
The "other" Catholics: East in communion with Rome
Unity already exists in a form many never notice. Alongside the Latin (Roman) Church, the Catholic Church includes 23 self-governing Eastern Catholic churches, about 18 million members, who keep ancient Eastern liturgies (Byzantine, Syriac, Armenian, and more) while being in full communion with the pope. They include the Syro-Malabar and Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches and the Maronites, who say they never broke with Rome at all. They are a living bridge between the Christian East and West. Source: Eastern Catholic Churches.
How Orthodoxy holds together (and doesn't)
Behind the Orthodox stories on this page sits a distinctive structure. The Eastern Orthodox Church, about 220 million adherents, is the second-largest Christian communion after Rome, but it has no pope. It is a family of self-governing ("autocephalous") national churches, with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople honored only as "first among equals." Roughly half of all Orthodox Christians live in Russia and the former Eastern Bloc, which is why a Moscow-Constantinople quarrel can shake the whole communion. Source: Eastern Orthodox Church.
The Catholic Church, by the billion
The largest single Christian body keeps growing, and shifting. The Vatican's yearbook put the global Catholic population at about 1.4 billion (1.406 billion by the 2023 count, rising past 1.42 billion in 2024), roughly 18 percent of humanity. The growth is lopsided: Africa surged 3.3 percent in a year (led by the Democratic Republic of Congo's 55 million and Nigeria's 35 million Catholics) while Europe crept up just 0.2 percent. The Americas still hold the largest share, with Brazil alone home to 182 million Catholics. Source: The Catholic Herald (reporting the Vatican yearbook).
And the Protestants, gaining
The other great branch is harder to count, because it is so many things at once, but it is large and growing. By one analysis, roughly 1.04 to 1.12 billion people identify as Protestant (in the broad sense, including evangelicals, Pentecostals, and independent churches), about 39 to 42 percent of all Christians. Trinitarian Protestantism is said to have already overtaken Roman Catholicism in global church attendance, and on current trends Protestants could be nearly half of all Christians by 2050. Source: Center for the Study of Global Christianity data (via CCC).
The Adventists' global surge
Among the faster-growing global Protestant bodies is the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which reported 22,785,195 members at the end of 2023 and has since passed 23 million. Like so much of Christianity today, its growth is concentrated in the Global South: its largest unit is the East-Central Africa Division (over 5.3 million members), and its African divisions together account for nearly 10 million, with Latin America (the Inter-American and South American divisions) close behind. Source: Adventist world demographics (church statistics).
The Salvation Army: a church in uniform
One of Christianity's most recognizable bodies is easy to mistake for a charity. William and Catherine Booth founded it in London in 1865 as "The Christian Mission," renamed the Salvation Army in 1878; it calls itself "an evangelical part of the universal Christian Church" whose mission is "to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination." It now serves in over 100 countries and, by its own count, helps more than 27 million people a year through shelters, disaster relief, and recovery programs. Source: The Salvation Army.
The church as the world's hospital
One of Christianity's largest footprints is medical. The Catholic Church alone runs about 117,000 health facilities, hospitals, clinics, and care homes, an estimated 26 percent of the world's healthcare. The reach is greatest where states are weakest: the World Health Organization has estimated that faith-based organizations own between 30 and 70 percent of all health infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, and church hospitals provide, for example, around 40 percent of HIV care in Lesotho. For millions in remote villages and slums, the nearest clinic is a Christian one. Source: National Library of Medicine (PMC).
And the world's schoolhouse
The same is true of the classroom. Christian missionary schools were, in much of Africa, the continent's first structured schools, founded through the 19th and 20th centuries and providing the bulk of formal education in the colonial era, often before any state system existed. The aim was partly evangelistic, teaching people to read so they could read the Bible, but the byproduct was mass literacy. The legacy endures: faith-based schools still account for more than 20 percent of primary enrollment in a number of African countries, especially where government provision is thin. Source: Africa Education.
And the world's relief workers
The third arm is disaster relief and development. World Vision, founded in 1950 to care for Korean War orphans, is now the largest Christian relief-and-development organization on earth, with revenue around 3.14 billion dollars, some 33,000 staff, and work in over 100 countries. It is not alone: Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. Catholic bishops' overseas agency founded in 1943, and Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse are among the world's larger humanitarian groups, several Christian relief agencies now rank among the biggest NGOs anywhere. Source: World Vision International.
The church and the environment
Care for creation has become its own front. In 2015, Pope Francis issued "Laudato Si'," the first papal encyclical devoted to the environment, arguing for an "integral ecology" in which care for the earth and justice for the poor are one cause, not two. It reshaped Catholic social teaching, was read by scientists who had never opened a papal document, and helped frame the 2015 Paris climate talks. The wider response among Christians is uneven, many evangelicals remain wary of climate activism, but a "creation care" movement now spans Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant lines. Source: USCCB.
Church of England, same-sex blessings
In February 2023 the Church of England's General Synod voted to apologize to LGBTQ+ people and to commend the "Prayers of Love and Faith," allowing clergy to offer blessings to same-sex couples, while still not permitting same-sex marriage in its churches. Source: The Church of England.
Roman Catholic Church, the Synod on Synodality
On October 26, 2024, the Synod on Synodality approved its 155-paragraph final document, which Pope Francis made part of his official teaching at once. It left the most-debated question open: "the question of women's access to diaconal ministry remains open," and "discernment needs to continue" (the women-deacons paragraph drew 97 votes against). Source: Aleteia.
The Vatican on trial: financial reform
Pope Francis's drive to clean up Vatican finances reached a landmark on December 16, 2023, when the Vatican City State court convicted Cardinal Angelo Becciu of embezzlement and sentenced him to five and a half years, the first time in 500 years a cardinal stood trial on penal charges in the Vatican. The case centered on a London property the Secretariat of State bought for 350 million euros and sold for about 186 million, a loss of roughly 139 million. Source: America Magazine.
The abuse crisis and its cost
No account of the church today is honest without it. The clergy sexual-abuse scandal has reshaped the Catholic Church and cost it enormously: by Georgetown University's CARA, U.S. dioceses paid about 4.384 billion dollars to settle abuse claims between 2004 and 2023, and recent settlements push the total past 5.5 billion, including 880 million from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and 323 million from the Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York, both in 2024. A wave of dioceses has filed for bankruptcy under the weight of claims. Source: OSV News.
Not only a Catholic reckoning
Protestants have faced their own. In May 2022 the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant body, released a 288-page independent report by Guidepost Solutions that found its Executive Committee had mishandled abuse for some two decades and stonewalled survivors, while a staff member quietly kept a list of more than 700 accused ministers, never acting to keep them out of ministry. Days later the SBC published the long-secret list and pledged reform. It was a painful but real act of accountability, and a reminder that the abuse crisis is not confined to one communion. Source: The Baptist Paper.
Pakistan: blasphemy as a weapon
In Pakistan, persecution runs through the law itself. Christians are about 1.6 percent of the population but are disproportionately caught by the blasphemy laws, under which Section 295-C carries a mandatory death sentence and, rights groups say, "accusations alone are tantamount to a sentence." The charges are frequently fabricated from personal grudges, and an accusation can ignite mob violence: in August 2023, after two Christians were accused of desecrating the Quran, mobs in Jaranwala burned 26 churches and many homes, and a year later fewer than 400 of an estimated 5,000 attackers had been arrested. Source: Christian Solidarity International.
Orthodoxy, the Moscow–Constantinople rupture
The largest split in modern Orthodoxy: on October 15, 2018, the Russian Orthodox Church, more than half of all Eastern Orthodox Christians, severed full communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople after Constantinople moved to grant independence (autocephaly) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Patriarch Bartholomew signed the tomos of autocephaly on January 5, 2019. Source: 2018 Moscow–Constantinople schism.
Germany's Synodal Way and the tension with Rome
The sharpest test of Catholic unity runs through Germany. Launched in 2019 after the abuse crisis, the Synodal Way voted in March 2023 to let lay men and women preach at Mass and, by 38 bishops to 9, to permit blessings of same-sex couples, alongside calls to reconsider priestly celibacy and women's ordination. Rome objected strongly, barring the proposed permanent "Synodal Council" of laity and bishops as an overreach of episcopal authority, and Pope Francis warned against stoking division. The standoff is the clearest live fault line between a national church and the Vatican. Source: OSV News.
The war that split Orthodoxy further
Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine drove a deeper wound through the Orthodox world. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow openly backed the war, appearing at Kremlin events and blessing the aggression, casting it as a defense of the church across the old empire. The fallout was severe: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, long tied to Moscow, declared independence from the Moscow Patriarchate in May 2022 and stopped praying for Kirill, and Orthodox bodies in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia moved to separate as well. Source: Carnegie Endowment.
The Vatican–China deal on bishops
Rome's most contested diplomacy is with Beijing. A provisional 2018 agreement, never published, is believed to let Chinese authorities propose bishop candidates with final approval reserved to the pope; it was renewed a third time on October 22, 2024, this round for four years. Supporters say it begins to reunite China's state-backed and "underground" Catholics; critics, led by Hong Kong's Cardinal Joseph Zen, call it a surrender on religious freedom, and Beijing has breached it (installing bishops without Vatican consent in 2022 and 2024). Source: Crux.
The Latin Mass restricted
An old liturgy became a new flashpoint. On July 16, 2021, Pope Francis issued Traditionis Custodes, restricting the Traditional Latin Mass (the 1962 missal) by requiring priests to get their bishop's explicit permission, reversing Benedict XVI's 2007 ruling that had freed any priest to celebrate it. Francis said worldwide bishop surveys showed the older rite was being used "in an ideological way" to reject the Second Vatican Council. The move drew a sharp backlash from traditionalist Catholics, among whom the old Mass had been drawing notably young crowds. Source: America Magazine.
The great revivals
The splits are only half the picture. Alongside the fragmentation, the church keeps gathering, sometimes by the hundreds of thousands. The revivals below are named with their figures and movements; no song lyrics are reproduced. The newest, still-current gatherings are held for the Phase-2 live feed, where each will be sourced before it posts.
In history
- The Welsh Revival, 1904–05. Under Evan Roberts, an awakening swept Wales and rippled around the world, one of the most studied revivals of the modern era.
- Azusa Street, 1906. A multi-year revival on a Los Angeles back street, under William Seymour, from which modern Pentecostalism spread across the globe.
- Billy Graham, Seoul, 1973. At the closing meeting on June 3, Graham preached to more than 1.1 million people at Yoido Plaza, reported as the largest live audience to that point for an evangelistic message. (Billy Graham Library)
- The Jesus Movement, late 1960s–70s. A wave of conversions among the young of America's counterculture that reshaped worship and evangelism for a generation.
- São Paulo March for Jesus, 2019. The 27th edition of the march, held annually since 1993, drew a reported three million people through São Paulo, its largest turnout since it began. (Fox News)
Recent
- THE SEND, Brazil, 2020 (reported). A 12-hour evangelistic gathering across stadiums in Brasília and São Paulo. Figures as reported, pending a primary source before exact numbers are published: reportedly more than 140,000 in person and over 1.7 million on the Portuguese livestream. (Fox News)
- Franklin Graham, Copacabana, 2022. More than 68,000 gathered on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for an evangelistic event. (Fox News)
- Asbury University, 2023. A spontaneous outpouring at Hughes Auditorium in Wilmore, Kentucky (February 8–24, 2023), after students stayed to worship following a chapel service, drew an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 visitors from more than 200 colleges and several countries. (Wikipedia)
- National Eucharistic Congress, 2024. Part of the U.S. Catholic Church's National Eucharistic Revival, the 10th National Eucharistic Congress drew nearly 60,000 Catholics to Indianapolis (July 17–21, 2024), with more than 1,600 priests, seminarians, and bishops in its opening procession. (Catholic News Agency)
- The Jubilee Year, 2025. Pope Francis opened the Holy Door at St. Peter's on December 24, 2024 to launch the Catholic Holy Year, themed "Pilgrims of Hope" and held about every 25 years; more than 30 million pilgrims are expected in Rome before it closes in early 2026. (Euronews)
The Church, by the Numbers →
Attendance, adherence, growth and decline, every figure sourced. Moved to its own page so the tracker stays readable.
Church news feed
FAITH_TRACKER_SOURCES.md and balanced across traditions, built on the same pattern as the site's other trackers. Each item carries the specific outlet it was fetched from; verify-or-skip, never asserted from memory.Scripture now in print in 807 languages, with 1,844 New Testaments beside it
Wycliffe Bible Translators reports the full Bible translated into 807 languages, the New Testament into a further 1,844, and smaller portions into 1,519 more. Agencies working toward the illumiNations 2033 goal say translation is on track to begin in every remaining language by 2033. Source: Wycliffe Bible Translators.
European Parliament condemns the killing of Christians in Nigeria, 510 votes to 1
The resolution followed the 22 June raid on Kawel village in Bokkos, Plateau State, in which more than twenty Christians were killed including Rev. Markus Nyam of the Church of Christ in Nations. It asked the EU Special Envoy to attend to Christians and all persecuted religious communities there, and pressed Nigerian authorities to prosecute those responsible and improve early warning and support for the displaced. Source: ADF International.
UN experts warn on women and girls of religious minorities in Nigeria
Independent UN human-rights experts raised concerns about abductions and forced conversion affecting women and girls from Christian and other religious minority communities, which is the same violence read through a non-church source. Source: UN OHCHR.
Christian Reformed Church Synod 2026 leaves the World Communion of Reformed Churches
Synod also declined to require that all denominational employees be confessing members of a CRC congregation, voted to take the 2008 statement Our World Belongs to God out of the Covenant for Officebearers, and ruled that exclusively digital ministries are not to be called churches, while online extensions of existing churches are unaffected. Source: Christian Reformed Church.
Pew: governments harassed religious groups in 185 of 198 countries
Pew's June 2026 report found religious harassment by governments in 98 percent of countries studied in 2023, with social hostilities elevated in 55. Source: Pew, via OSV News.
Southern Baptists vote to bar churches with women pastors
The SBC passed the "Truth and Unity Amendment" with about 74.66 percent, the first of two required votes. Source: The Christian Post.
Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical warns on artificial intelligence
Magnifica Humanitas cautions against letting AI dominate humanity and calls just-war thinking "outdated." Source: National Catholic Reporter.
An American "Easter boom" of adult converts
U.S. dioceses reported sharp rises in adults entering the church through OCIA, some calling it a regional revival. Source: OSV News.
Open Doors' 2026 World Watch List: Nigeria the deadliest
Open Doors reports 3,490 Christians killed in Nigeria, ~72 percent of the global total; the UN cautions the violence is not only religious. Sources: Open Doors via EWTN, UN News.
Orthodox bishops report a "flood" of converts in the US
The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops describes an "accelerated growth" of converts, especially among the young. Source: Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops.
A balanced, multi-tradition page by design: it names the splits and the gatherings, the discouraging news and the encouraging. Every claim above is either established pre-modern history or is backed by a source actually retrieved and quoted; current developments are held for the Phase-2 live feed.
Sources retrieved and linked inline (73 outlets and documents)
Sources retrieved and linked inline: the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (Article VI), the Christian Post, CNN, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, the National Catholic Reporter, CBS News, EWTN Vatican, Catholic News Agency, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops, Anadolu Agency, Pew Research Center, the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, The Good Newsroom, The Leaven, Relevant, the Lausanne Movement, The World (PRX), The Gospel Coalition, Operation World, Christian Today, OSV News, Gallup, WBUR On Point, LSE Religion & Global Society, Open Doors, UN News, The Wire, Christian Solidarity International, Under Caesar's Sword (Notre Dame), CNEWA, the Hudson Institute, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Gideons International, The Christian Science Monitor, the Catholic Standard, Deseret News, YouVersion, KCUR, Lifeway Research, PRRI, The Conversation, UM News, the Global Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Church of England, the Anglican Church in North America, Aleteia, America Magazine, Catholic Review, Crux, the Carnegie Endowment, the Constitution of Zambia, the Constitution of Samoa (2017), Gulf News, the 2018 Moscow–Constantinople schism, the 2023 Asbury revival, the Billy Graham Library, Euronews, the Immersive Realities Center (Lucerne), Worship Leader Research, Human Rights Watch, the World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Methodist Council, the World Communion of Reformed Churches, the Mennonite World Conference, the Assemblies of God, the Catholic Herald, Premier Christianity, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, ReligionUnplugged, the Langham Partnership, the Joshua Project, the USCCB, the World History Encyclopedia, and Fox News.
Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Related: Loving the Church You Disagree With, Covenant, The Creeds.