BIRMINGHAM (BP) – Many church calendars tend to mirror the local school system’s. That means this time of year, there may be a new blend of faces in Sunday school, small groups and worship as people get back into a routine. But what about faces in the neighborhood that are missing? A resource that first appeared in March can be helpful for churches wanting more information on the evangelical makeup of their state or even county.
The U.S. Religion Census has taken place every 10 years since 1990, with the tabulation process delaying the availability of results into the third year. JD Payne, a professor at Samford University with a background in church planting and evangelism research at the North American Mission Board and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, sifted through the data alongside four students near the end of 2025.
The results were published in March. They include findings of evangelical percentages for all states as well as many counties and metro areas, alongside an interactive map and Excel file showing data going back 40 years.
“We wanted this to be available as widely and far as possible,” said Payne. “We want churches and mission organizations to use it in their ministries and church planting, as there is an emphasis on least-reached areas.”
Parsing through the data required some nuance. The original census, for instance, included an LDS group among its evangelical groupings. Payne and his team had to strip out those sections for the final product.
“They allowed religious groups to self-define,” he explained. “It’s a breakaway group from the Latter-Day Saints. Because of our theological convictions, we extracted those figures.”
The interactive map came about after a team member of the Diaspora Missions Collective with the International Mission Board caught wind of Payne’s research.
“He knew we were building this and asked if we wanted to collaborate. They could use our findings to create a web-based tool,” Payne said.
The map not only notes the percentage of evangelicals in each state, but dives further into the numbers to reveal the 100 least-evangelical counties and 50 least-evangelical metro areas in the U.S. The metro findings include the foreign countries represented within their populations. Just as significant, it charts the home countries of residents from outside the U.S.
“We wanted to look not just at where the least-reached places were, but what unreached people groups are migrating to the U.S.,” Payne said. “Where are they migrating to? You’re going to find examples like groups from the Horn of Africa working in the Midwest, drawn by available work at a meatpacking plant. Those groups aren’t just settling in urban areas.
“The Lord isn’t just calling us to go into the world. He’s moving large portions of the world to our backyards.”
That, he added, calls on churches and mission groups to think “apostolically.”
“We have to learn how to cross cultural gaps, like they did in the New Testament, even in our backyard in a rural context. That may mean our methods are going to have to shift. It may mean you’re going to have to start new groups and potentially new churches if it’s tough to assimilate people into the local church … because of those cultural gaps.”
He advocates an approach to evangelism that considers cultural gaps.
“Even with people who look, smell and talk like me, our worldviews create a cultural gap,” said Payne. “In a place like New England, you have a very strong nominal Christian tradition. That’s going to be a different cultural leap than Utah, where the LDS church has been present for generations.”
When asked to predict how another map 40 years in the future could look, Payne pointed back to the current one.
“There are encouraging things to report. We see some of the least-reached states experiencing great growth among evangelicals,” he said. “We need to ask why that is happening. Is it conversion growth? Are people moving in from the Deep South?”
Payne is available to speak with crowds about the research and can be reached through his website.
“We need to think like missionaries,” said Payne. “We need to learn to communicate in ways people can understand. While the Gospel never changes, our methods are always in flux.”
