Nondenominational congregations are those Protestant Christian churches, often with a conservative theology, that intentionally stand apart from explicit ties to an organized religious group.
It is nearly impossible to know exactly how many nondenominational churches there are in the United States or what their membership might be. The best guess is that there are 45,000 independent and nondenominational congregations currently with approximately 10,000,000 members in the United States, making these congregations a large but relatively anonymous presence in the U.S. religious landscape.
The presence of nondenominational churches in the FACT project included a survey of 2500 churches randomly chosen from a very inexact listing of independent/nondenominational congregations in the United States. A total of 133 questionnaires were returned for a 5.32% response rate. View the version of the questionnaire used to survey nondenominational and independent churches.
A new study of nondenominational churches will be conducted in 2010 in conjunction with the FACT2010 efforts.
If you are interested in obtaining specific information about the results of the nondenominational survey, please get in touch with the official contact person Scott Thumma at sthumma@hartsem.edu.
You can find further information about the Nondenominational Congregations Faith Communities Today participation at the web pages devoted to this project on the Hartford Institute web site.