Insights

The State of Missions in U.S. Churches

A sourced research brief. Every statistic is dated and attributed. Where reliable data does not exist, that is stated explicitly.

TL;DR

  • U.S. churches still fund and send missions on a large scale, but the money and messengers are increasingly disconnected from the frontier. Southern Baptists alone gave a record $207.2 million to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering in FY2024–25, and the United States remains the world’s single largest sender of missionaries (about 135,000 going out). Yet of the world’s roughly 450,000 cross-cultural missionaries, an estimated 435,000 serve among already-reached peoples and only about 15,000 (roughly 3%) among the unreached — who number about 3.3 billion people, more than 40% of humanity (Lausanne, 2024).
  • The underlying congregational engine is weakening. Religion’s share of U.S. charitable giving fell from 62% in 1984 to 23% in 2024 (Giving USA 2025), and per-member giving as a share of income has declined since 1968 (Empty Tomb). Meanwhile, over half of U.S. churchgoers have never heard the term “the Great Commission” (Barna/Seed Company, 2018), and pastors (85% call missions a mandate for all) far outpace laypeople (25%) in missions conviction (Barna, 2022).
  • Bright spots are real. Global Christianity is growing faster than world population (more than 2.67 billion Christians in 2026, up from ~2.5 billion in 2020, per the Center for the Study of Global Christianity); Bible translation has accelerated dramatically (from ~2,000 languages awaiting translation in 2020 to just 544 by August 2025, Wycliffe Global Alliance/ProgressBible); and the SBC’s IMB reported its highest missionary-applicant pipeline in 15 years in 2025. The center of gravity for both sending and receiving, however, has shifted decisively to the Global South.

Key Findings

  1. Missions giving is under structural pressure, even where headline numbers look healthy. Religion’s share of total U.S. charitable giving has fallen from 62% in 1984 to 23% in 2024 (Giving USA 2025 / Lake Institute). Evangelical congregations devote about 14% of their budgets to “mission and benevolence” (Faith Communities Today, 2020 data), but this figure blends local benevolence with global missions and cannot be cleanly split.
  2. U.S. missionary sending remains large but is aging and flat-to-declining in the mainline, while the Global South rises. The United States sponsors roughly 135,000 of the world’s ~450,000 missionaries (Lausanne/World Christian Database, 2024). Mainline sending has collapsed (the PCUSA disbanded its career missionary program in 2024); evangelical agencies are steadier, with the SBC’s IMB reporting a 15-year high in applicants in 2025.
  3. The distribution of missionaries relative to need is the central strategic failure. About 97% of missionaries serve among reached peoples; only ~3% reach the unreached ~40% of the world (Lausanne 2024).
  4. Congregational awareness is thin and generationally strained. About half of churchgoers do not know the term “Great Commission” (Barna, 2018), and roughly a third of young Christians call missions’ past “unethical” (Barna, 2020).
  5. Church missions infrastructure is badly under-measured. There is no reliable recent national statistic on how many churches have a missions committee, a written missions policy, or an annual missions conference — a genuine gap in the research literature.

Details

Theme 1: Missions Giving

62% → 23%

Religion’s share of all U.S. charitable giving fell from 62% in 1984 to 23% in 2024 (Giving USA 2025, published by the Giving USA Foundation and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy).

  • Total U.S. charitable giving reached $592.50 billion in 2024. Giving to religion was $146.54 billion (23%) — a 1.9% nominal increase that translated to a roughly 1% decline when adjusted for inflation, making religion the only major subsector to decline in real terms (Giving USA 2025; Lake Institute on Faith & Giving, July 15, 2025). Religion held 34% of total giving as recently as 2011, showing the decline is accelerating. (Update note: Giving USA 2026, released June 2026, put 2025 religious giving at $151.58 billion — still 23% of the total.)
  • Church member giving as a share of income has declined since 1968: from 3.02% (1968) to 2.17% (2015–2016), per Empty Tomb’s The State of Church Giving series. Giving to “benevolences” — the category that includes missions, seminary support, and denominational work — fell to about 0.34% of income in 2011, the lowest level since at least 1968 (Empty Tomb, via Religion News Service, 2013). Church member giving declined again in 2019, before the pandemic (Empty Tomb, The State of Church Giving through 2019, January 2022).
  • The share of church budgets kept for internal congregational use rose from 79% (1968) to 84% (2015), while benevolences fell from 21% to 16% (Empty Tomb, 2018).
  • Congregations spend, on average, about 13% of expenditures on “mission and benevolence.” Evangelical Protestant congregations spend about 14%, versus 9% for mainline Protestants and 8% for Catholic/Orthodox (Faith Communities Today, “FACTs on Finance,” March 2022, based on the 2020 FACT survey of 15,278 congregations across 80 traditions — the largest U.S. congregational survey conducted; corroborated by Lifeway Research, March 25, 2025). Caveat: this category combines global missions with local benevolence and is not broken into global vs. local — no reputable source provides that split.
  • On current church finances: 62% of U.S. congregations operate at a surplus; average church revenue is about $165,000 and the average churchgoer gives $2,222/year (Faith Communities Today, via Lifeway Research, 2025). Only about a third of churches (37%) saw any giving increase over the prior year in 2025, and average offerings rose 2.1% against 2.9% inflation (Lifeway Research, October 14, 2025, phone survey of 1,003 Protestant pastors, Sept. 2–24, 2025).
  • Flag (avoid or caveat): The widely repeated claim that only ~1% of missions money reaches the unreached — and the related “90% of funding goes to reached peoples” and “average American Christian gives 1 penny a day to missions” lines — trace to Barrett & Johnson’s World Christian Trends (2001) and K.P. Yohannan’s books; cite as dated illustrations, not current data.

Theme 2: Missionary Sending

450,000

Approximately 450,000 cross-cultural missionaries worldwide in 2025, with the United States the largest single sender at about 135,000 (Center for the Study of Global Christianity; Lausanne, 2024).

  • The CSGC’s Status of Global Christianity reports approximately 450,000 missionaries sent from their home countries in 2025, growing about 1.15% per year and projected to reach roughly 600,000 by 2050 and 700,000 by 2075 (CSGC, via Lifeway Research, February 2025 and April 2026). These forward figures are model-based projections, not measured outcomes.
  • Per the World Christian Database’s 2020 figures cited in Lausanne’s 2024 State of the Great Commission Report, “the top sender — and the top receiver — of missionaries is the United States, with 135,000 missionaries going out and 38,000 coming in from abroad,” followed by Brazil (40,000) and South Korea (35,000) (Christianity Today, September 25, 2024). MinistryWatch (2024) similarly reports North America sponsors about 143,000 of ~425,000 missionaries in the field while 46,200 missionaries from other countries now serve in North America — evidence of “polycentric,” from-everywhere-to-everywhere missions.
  • Mainline collapse: The Presbyterian Church (USA), after 188 years, effectively disbanded its career missionary program in 2024, laying off 54 missionaries — nearly its entire remaining corps — down from 200 as recently as 2010. By contrast, the breakaway Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) supports 509 career missionaries and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church 141 (MinistryWatch / The Roys Report, 2024).
  • Evangelical steadiness and growth: The SBC’s IMB supports about 3,600 international missionaries in more than 100 countries (IMB, 2024). Its missionary-applicant pipeline “passed 1,500 applicants — the highest number in 15 years” in early 2025 (Baptist Press, February 5, 2025), after running above 1,300 through 2024; by year-end the pipeline had risen to about 1,627 (Baptist Press, December 2025). IMB also reported its largest field-preparation class in a decade and rising average tenure of service (IMB, September 2024).
  • Attrition/retention: The benchmark studies remain ReMAP (1997) and ReMAP II (2007), conducted by the World Evangelical Alliance’s Mission Commission; ReMAP II gathered data from about 600 agencies in 22 countries representing ~40,000 missionaries. ReMAP found average annual missionary attrition of about 5.1%; the U.S. retention study found an average annual total retention rate of 94.56%, meaning an agency keeping ~94.5% of its people each year retains only about 57% over a decade. Roughly half of missionaries serve five years or less (Nations Outreach, 2026, secondary). These benchmarks are nearly two decades old and measure agencies rather than churches.
  • Support raising: Practitioner sources consistently cite 6–12 months to raise full support (Crossworld; Pioneers, via Ask A Missionary), with some reaching full funding in 60–90 days and others taking two years or more. Bethany Global University reports the average financial partner gives about $70/month and that only about 37% of a contacted list ultimately commits. These are practitioner estimates, not nationally representative survey data.
  • Flag: The framing “1,135,000 missionaries in 2001 down to ~430,000 today” (Nations Outreach) reflects differing definitions (Catholic plus Protestant; varying length-of-service thresholds) rather than a clean decline; use with caution.

Theme 3: Church Structure and Practice

No reliable data

No reliable current national statistic exists for the share of U.S. churches with a missions committee, a written missions policy, or an annual missions conference — a significant and citable gap in the research.

  • The most solid budget figure is Faith Communities Today’s ~14% “mission and benevolence” for evangelicals (2020 data; see Theme 1). Faith Communities Today combines “mission and benevolence” and does not separate global missions from local outreach.
  • Flag (do not cite as authoritative): The frequently repeated claim that “only ~20% of evangelical churches have a missions conference” traces only to a Ministry127 article that attributes it to an unnamed “popular Christian magazine,” with no year or methodology. It is unverifiable.
  • Per-church support levels cluster at $50–$300/month per supporting church (Gospel Fellowship Association Missions; Propempo; Ask A Missionary), with sending/home churches often providing 20–50% of a missionary’s total need (Propempo). Mission agencies typically retain 7–12% of raised support for back-office and field services (MinistryWatch, 2024). These are practitioner norms, not survey data.
  • On the values that guide church decisions, Barna’s The Great Disconnect (2022, produced with Mission India; 2,000 U.S. self-identified Christians surveyed June 2021, ±2%, and 507 Protestant senior pastors surveyed October 2021, ±1.7%) found 88% of pastors say equipping indigenous/local leaders is most important in missions (only 6% prioritize short-term), versus 46% of churchgoers; and 77% of pastors prioritize gospel proclamation over promoting justice (15%), while churchgoers split nearly evenly (43% gospel / 37% justice).
  • Commentary: The absence of measured data on missions committees, written policies, conferences, and member-care practices means churches trying to benchmark their own missions program have no national reference points. This is an opportunity for a resource platform to aggregate or commission original data.

Theme 4: Congregational Awareness and Engagement

51%

About half of U.S. churchgoers have never heard the term “the Great Commission,” and only about 17–20% can both recognize the term and explain it (Barna/Seed Company, 2018; Barna/Mission India, 2021).

  • In Barna and Seed Company’s Translating the Great Commission (released March 27, 2018; 1,004 U.S. churchgoers interviewed October 2017): “When asked if they had previously ‘heard of the Great Commission,’ half of U.S. churchgoers (51%) say they do not know this term.” Only 17% knew the term and its meaning; 25% had heard it but could not recall its meaning; and 37% could not identify the passage even when shown a list.
  • Awareness is generational: in 2018, 29% of Elders and 26% of Boomers knew the term, versus 17% of Gen X and 10% of Millennials (Barna). By 2021, about 20% of churchgoers could correctly identify it (Barna/Mission India). Evangelicals score highest — 60% aware, 74% correctly identifying it (Barna).
  • The pastor–pew gap: 85% of pastors say missions is a biblical mandate for all Christians; only 25% of Christians agree, with 51% calling it “a calling for some” (Barna, The Great Disconnect, 2022).
  • Young-adult skepticism: In Barna’s The Future of Missions (2020, commissioned by the IMB; surveying 1,000 young adults 18–34, 602 teens, 1,500 older adults, and 504 parents), 34% of young adult Christians agreed that “in the past, missions work has been unethical” (versus 23% of those 35+), and 42% agreed that “Christian mission is tainted by its association with colonialism” (versus 29% of older adults). About one in four engaged Christians aged 18–34 are “supportive skeptics.”
  • Commentary: Young skeptics are not disengaged — they are more likely than peers to personally know a missionary (83% vs. 77%) and to have gone on an international missions trip (41% vs. 29%) (Barna, 2020). Their objections tend to be about method and ethics, not the mission itself.

Theme 5: Short-Term Missions

1.5M+

An estimated 1.5–1.6 million Americans take short-term mission trips annually, at a cost of roughly $2 billion (Robert Priest, Missiology journal, 2008).

  • Participation grew from 540 Americans in 1965 to more than 1.5 million annually (Priest, Missiology, 2008, via Baylor University). About one-third of U.S. congregations sponsor such trips (Robert Wuthnow’s research, cited in Making a Difference in a Globalized World).
  • Flag (date carefully): The “$2 billion” and “1.5–1.6 million participants” figures date to 2008 and are now roughly 17 years old; they remain the most-cited numbers but should always be dated. A viral “$45 billion / over 2 million” figure (Ministry Travel) is unsupported and should be avoided.
  • Effectiveness research is mixed. Baylor’s Dennis Horton found qualified benefits but stressed that most trips need far more follow-up to produce lasting change; Robert Priest concluded that the short-term trip functions primarily as spiritual formation for the sender rather than evangelization of the receiver, noting participants often rehearse a “changed by the experience” narrative given to them before departure.
  • Pastors overwhelmingly prefer equipping indigenous leaders (88%) over short-term trips (6%), yet short-term remains the dominant U.S. model in practice (Barna, 2022).

Theme 6: The Unfinished Task

97% / 3%

An estimated 435,000 of the world’s ~450,000 cross-cultural missionaries serve among already-reached peoples, and only about 15,000 (~3%) serve among the unreached, who number about 3.3 billion people — more than 40% of humanity (Lausanne, State of the Great Commission Report, 2024).

  • Lausanne 2024 (summarized by missiologist J.D. Payne, April 23, 2024): “435,000 missionaries are serving among reached peoples (4.6 billion); and 15,000 missionaries are serving among unreached peoples (3.3 billion)” — meaning “97% of the global missionaries are serving reached areas of the world.” The gospel has reached an estimated 4.57 billion people, while 3.34 billion remain unreached (Lausanne, using Joshua Project data; Christianity Today, September 2024).
  • Joshua Project (data as accessed 2026): 16,426 people groups worldwide; 7,162 unreached (43.6% of groups); 4,824 frontier people groups (29.4% of groups — nearly 1.9 billion people among whom fewer than 1 in 1,000 follow Christ); and an unreached population of about 3.62 billion, or 44% of the world. Finishing the Task counts 189 unengaged, unreached people groups (via Global Frontier Missions). Note: Joshua Project’s counts differ from the CSGC’s and the IMB’s because each uses different people-group definitions (e.g., caste/community versus ethnolinguistic); cross-reference rather than treating any single count as definitive.
  • Bible translation — a genuine bright spot: As of August 1, 2025, just 544 of the world’s ~7,396 living languages still awaited a Bible translation to begin — about 36.8 million people — down from 985 a year earlier, roughly 2,000 in 2020, and more than 5,000 in 1999 (Wycliffe Global Alliance / ProgressBible, August 2025; Wycliffe USA reports the figure fell to about 541 language communities by the end of 2025). A new translation project now starts, on average, every 15 hours (Wycliffe USA, 2024). The CSGC reports about 2,600 languages now have the New Testament, up from 228 in 1900.
  • Geographic mismatch: More missionaries are sent to Europe than to Asia, despite Asia holding about 60% of the global population and most of the world’s unreached (Lausanne 2024). Sending a missionary to Europe costs 10 times or more than supporting an indigenous worker in Asia or Africa (Lausanne 2024).

Theme 7: Church Planting and Indigenous/Marketplace Missions

75%

Three in four U.S. Protestant churches (75%) direct 1% or less of their budget specifically to church planting (Lifeway Research / Exponential, 2025).

  • About a quarter of churches give more than 1% of their budget directly to church plants; 75% give 1% or less (Lifeway Research, March 2025). Barriers cited: existing commitments to specific ministries (79%), giving through a network or denomination that does similar work (75%), and existing commitments to fund missionaries directly (65%); 27% say they cannot cover their own monthly expenses. Churches say they would give more if connected to a specific need (72%) or if they knew the church planter personally (66%).
  • Pastors strongly favor an indigenous emphasis: 88% say equipping local leaders is most important in missions (Barna, 2022).
  • The SBC’s NAMB reports Southern Baptists started more than 11,000 new churches since 2010 through the Send Network, with a four-year church-plant survival rate that “consistently hovers around 89 percent” (NAMB, 2024).
  • Tentmaking / marketplace (“business as mission”): Data unavailable. No reliable recent survey quantifies its scale, although it is widely discussed as a growing model for “creative-access” countries. The frequently cited figure that “86 countries restrict or prohibit Western missionaries” is dated (K.P. Yohannan, via The Traveling Team) and should be caveated.

Theme 8: Bright Spots

  • Global Christianity is growing faster than world population. There are now more than 2.67 billion Christians globally, up from around 2.5 billion in 2020, growing about 0.95%/year versus world population growth of 0.86%/year, per the CSGC’s Status of Global Christianity 2026 (Gina Zurlo, Todd Johnson & Peter Crossing, “World Christianity 2026,” International Bulletin of Mission Research, Vol. 50(1), January 2026). About 69% of Christians now live in the Global South, projected to reach 78% by 2050 — with Africa the continent with the most Christians since 2018.
  • Bible translation acceleration (see Theme 6) is arguably the strongest quantifiable success story in modern missions.
  • The IMB pipeline reached a 15-year high in 2025, and Southern Baptists gave a combined record $278.3 million to the Lottie Moon ($207.2 million) and Annie Armstrong ($71.1 million) offerings in FY2024–25 (IMB/Baptist Press, October 13, 2025).
  • Millennials are engaging financially. Barna/Mission India found Millennials have surpassed older generations in giving to missions, though they increasingly research and direct their giving personally rather than defer to church or agency recommendations.
  • Polycentric sending means Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines, and Nigeria are now among the world’s top missionary-sending nations (Lausanne 2024) — the U.S. church is one partner in a global movement rather than its sole engine.

Recommendations

  1. Date every statistic and retire the “zombie numbers.” Explicitly avoid or caveat: the “$2 billion / 1.5 million short-term missionaries” figures (2008), the “1% to the unreached” and “90% of funding to reached peoples” claims (Barrett & Johnson, 2001), the “$5.2 billion agency budget / 144,000 short-term” figures (Weber & Welliver, 2007), the “$45 billion” short-term figure (unsupported), the “86 countries restrict missionaries” line (Yohannan, undated), and the ReMAP attrition benchmarks (1997/2007). Use them only as historical illustrations, clearly dated.
  2. Anchor the page on the strongest current primary sources: Giving USA 2025/2026 (giving trends); Faith Communities Today 2020 and Lifeway Research 2025 (church budgets and finances); the CSGC’s Status of Global Christianity 2025/2026 and Lausanne’s 2024 State of the Great Commission Report (global totals and the unreached); Joshua Project (people-group counts, updated continuously); Wycliffe Global Alliance / ProgressBible 2025 (translation); Barna 2018/2020/2022 (awareness and generational attitudes); and IMB annual reports and Baptist Press (SBC sending and giving).
  3. Frame the central gap for local churches: the mismatch between where missionaries and money go (reached peoples; Europe) and where the need is greatest (the unreached in Asia and Africa). The “97% / 3%” split is the single most defensible, current, and actionable finding on the page — and it points directly to a church-level decision about whom to support and where.
  4. Treat the data vacuum on church practice as an opportunity. Because no national source measures missions-committee prevalence, written-policy prevalence, conference frequency, or member-care practices, a resource platform for local churches could commission or aggregate original benchmarking data and own that space.
  5. Benchmarks that would change these recommendations: if the CSGC or Lausanne revise the unreached-missionary share materially above ~3%; if Wycliffe/ProgressBible’s “languages remaining” count stalls rather than continues falling; or if a new national survey (Lifeway, Barna, or Faith Communities Today) measures missions-committee prevalence or a clean global-vs-local budget split — update the corresponding sections.

Caveats

  • Definitional inconsistency plagues missionary counts. “Missionary” spans Catholic and Protestant, long-term and short-term, and different service-length thresholds, producing wide swings (e.g., 425,000–450,000 globally; 135,000–143,000 for North America). Always state the source and its definition.
  • The 14% “missions” budget figure includes local benevolence and overstates global missions giving; no reputable source cleanly separates global from local.
  • Support-raising and per-missionary support figures are practitioner estimates, not nationally representative survey data — though their consistency across sources ($50–$300/month per church; ~$70/month per individual) lends them credibility as working norms.
  • Attrition and retention data are old (1997/2007) and measure agencies, not churches.
  • Several key church-practice metrics are simply unavailable in any reputable source: the prevalence of missions committees, written missions policies, and annual missions conferences; member-care practice rates; and the precise basis (personal relationship vs. agency vs. denomination) on which churches choose which missionaries to support. Barna’s Great Disconnect measures related values but not these specific behaviors.
  • Projections are projections. The CSGC’s 2050/2075 figures, denominational growth forecasts, and translation-completion timelines are model-based estimates, not measured outcomes, and should be presented with the appropriate tentative language (“projected,” “estimated”).
  • People-group counts differ by methodology. Joshua Project, the IMB, and the CSGC use different definitions of “people group” and “unreached,” so their totals will not match; this is a difference in method, not an error.

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