We have looked at how Austin has grown, how it has changed, and where the church sits across the region. Now we come to the heart of the matter: the data that has shaped our sense of urgency more than any other. What do the people of Greater Austin actually believe? And just as importantly, how does what they say they believe compare to how they live? This is the spiritual landscape, and reading it well requires us to hold two numbers in tension that are easy to confuse.

What People Say

Let’s begin with self-identification, which is simply how people describe themselves relative to faith when asked on a survey.

Drawing on the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, the most recent picture of the Austin metro looks roughly like this as of 2024. About 56% of adults identify as Christian. Within that, around 14% identify as evangelical Protestant, about 14% as mainline Protestant, around 3% as part of the historically Black Protestant tradition, and about 22% as Catholic. Another 8% or so identify with a faith other than Christianity. And then there is the figure that tells the deepest story: roughly 36% of Austin adults are religiously unaffiliated. Broken down, that is something like 9% atheist, 11% agnostic, and 16% who describe their religion as nothing in particular.

As we have sat with those numbers, two in particular stick out. Fewer than one in six adults in our metro identifies as an evangelical Protestant. And more than one third claim no religious affiliation at all. For a city in the heart of Texas, which is still very much in the Bible Belt, that is a remarkable picture. We will return in the next letter to how Austin compares to other cities, but the short version is that on the spiritual map, Austin looks less like its Texas neighbors and more like Denver or Portland. When people say “Austin is the hole in the buckle of the Bible belt” or the “blue dot in a red ocean,” they’re tapping into a reality - we’re different.

However, one honest caveat before we go on. These metro-level figures carry meaningful margins of error, often in the range of seven to nine points, because they come from surveys of a sample rather than a full count. The exact percentages will move a little depending on the study and the year. The overall shape, though, is consistent and clear, and it is moving in a definite direction.

What People Do

Here is where the most important distinction in this entire study comes into focus. Identification is not the same as practice. Saying you are a Christian and ordering your life around following Jesus are very different things, and the gap between them is enormous.

Barna offers a helpful, demanding definition here. A practicing Christian, in their framework, is someone who identifies with a Christian denomination, attends a worship service at least once a month, and says their faith is very important in their life. By that measure, the number of genuinely practicing Christians in a place is far smaller than the number who simply check the Christian box on a survey. The 56% who identify as Christian shrinks considerably when you ask not what people call themselves but how they actually live.

When you track practicing Christians against non-Christians over time, drawing on both Pew and Barna’s work, the trend lines tell a sobering story. The share of people who are practicing their faith in any meaningful, regular way has been declining, while the share of non-Christians, which Barna counts as including other faiths along with the agnostic, atheist, and no-faith population, has been climbing. The movement is rapid in Austin over a 12-year timeframe, and it is the kind of trend that compounds across a generation.

The Gap Is the Mission Field

It would be easy to read all this as bad news, and in one sense it is. But for those of us who want to think like missionaries, the gap between identification and practice is not just a discouraging statistic. It is a map of the mission field, and it points in two directions at once.

First, there is the large and growing population who claim no faith at all. These are our neighbors who are not drifting from the church because they were wounded by it, but who simply have no Christian background to drift from. For many of them, the gospel is not old news they have rejected. It is genuinely new news they have never seriously heard. That is a frontier, and it calls for the patient, curious, relational work of mission rather than the assumption that people already know the story and just need to come back.

Second, and just as significant, there is the gap inside the Christian category itself. A great many people in our region will tell a pollster they are Christian while living lives largely untouched by Jesus. This is its own kind of mission field, and in some ways a harder one, because nominal faith can be more resistant to the gospel than no faith at all. Part of the work in Austin is not only reaching those who have never believed, but calling those who believe in name into the living, practicing faith that actually transforms a life and a city.

And maybe a way of thinking about this dynamic is two-fold. First, there is not one single “Austin” - there are at least three:

1. Those engaged in the practice of their faith.

2. Those who identify in the faith but don’t participate.

3. Those who are in need of a faithful believer building a bridge to their different worldview.

And when it comes to demographics, there are many “Austins,” but colloquially, there are at least two - those who are largely Texan, and everyone else. This dual identity means the Church must speak two languages:

• One rooted in long-standing Texan values and relational networks.

• One fluent in the pluralism and complexity of a globalizing city.

The missional task, then, is to be both distinctly local and increasingly global.

A Reason for Hope, Not Despair

We do want to be careful here, though, because numbers like these can produce either despair or a kind of grim resignation, and neither belongs to the people of God. The data describes the field. It does not describe the limits of what God can do in it.

Remember that the early church was born into a world far more pagan than ours, with no cultural memory of the gospel and every structure arrayed against it, and it flourished! Remember too that the same Spirit who moved then is moving now. “I will build my church,” Jesus said, “and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). A post-Christian city is not beyond the reach of that promise. If anything, it is exactly the kind of place where the gospel has always done its most surprising work. And we long for the Spirit to renew the people of God and revive us for the work that is in our midst.

What the spiritual data asks of us is not panic but presence. It asks the church in Austin to stop assuming the city is Christian and start treating it as the mission field it has become, with all the humility, patience, and hope that mission requires.

In the next post, we will widen the lens and ask how Austin compares to other American cities, because where Austin sits among its peers reveals something important about where it is headed.

Until then, would you pray for the more than a third of our neighbors who claim no faith at all, and for the many more who claim the name of Christ without yet knowing him?

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In the last two letters, we looked at the city: how it has grown and how it has changed. Now we turn to a question much closer to our own hands at the Greater Austin Mission Society. Where is the church in all of this?

If the Lord has gathered millions of people into our region, how is his body distributed among them? This is the part of our study we have done ourselves, congregation by congregation, and it is where the data starts to feel less like a national trend and more like our own neighborhood.

How We Built the Map

There is no single registry of churches in Greater Austin. So we built our own picture the slow way, by identifying congregations across the region and reviewing publicly available information about each one, much of it from individual church websites. From that, we have been able to estimate the denominational and theological makeup of the churches here and to locate them geographically across our region.

Let me be honest about what that means…this data is subject to error. A church website does not always tell you what a congregation actually believes or how alive it is. We have surely missed some congregations and miscategorized others. While it is imperfect, it is sufficiently accurate to reflect the overall distribution of church affiliation across the region, and it is far better than the guesswork we would otherwise rely on. We would rather show you an honest, imperfect map than no map at all.

The aim of all of it is the same: to help the church see itself, so that we can pray and partner with our eyes open.

Click the image below to access the map:

Dividing the Region to See It Clearly

A metro of two and a half million people is too large to think about all at once. So we organized our study around Census County Divisions, or CCDs, which are the distinct communities the Census Bureau uses to divide a region into recognizable pieces. Greater Austin comprises fifteen of these divisions, and each has its own character, history, and spiritual reality.

The Austin CCD in Travis County, for instance, covers more than 460 square miles. The Round Rock-Georgetown CCD in Williamson County covers about a hundred eighty-four. These are not interchangeable places. The population density, the kinds of people who live there, and the number and health of churches vary widely from one division to the next. A region that looks reasonably churched in the aggregate can contain communities where the gospel presence is thin to the point of absence.

This is exactly why we are building toward prayer guides for each CCD, which will be a major focus of this newsletter in the seasons ahead. It is one thing to pray for “Austin.” It is another to pray for a specific community, by name, knowing something true about who lives there and what the church looks like among them. Mapping the region this way is the first step toward praying for it, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The Question of Saturation

Once you can count churches and people in the same place, a harder question comes into view. How much church does a community actually need? This is the question of gospel saturation, and it does not have a tidy answer. There is no agreed-upon standard for how many churches a population requires to be meaningfully reached.

But there are useful estimates. In his book Center Church, the pastor Tim Keller offered a set of benchmarks that many have found clarifying. When a community has roughly one church for every ten thousand people, he suggested, about one percent of the population attends. When it has one church for every thousand people, attendance tends to rise to something like fifteen to twenty percent. And when it reaches one church for every 500 people, more than 40% of the population attends.

Notice what those numbers imply. The relationship between churches and attendance is not flat. Beyond a certain density, the presence of more healthy congregations seems to lift the spiritual engagement of an entire community, not just fill more seats. Saturation is not about competition between churches. It is about a community reaching a threshold at which the gospel becomes a visible, accessible, and ordinary part of life rather than a rare exception. A neighborhood with one struggling church for many thousands of residents is a very different mission field from one where congregations are woven through daily life.

We are still doing the ongoing work of comparing church counts to population across each CCD, and we will share what we find as things change. But even the early picture makes one thing clear. Greater Austin is not uniformly reached. There are communities in our own region where, by any reasonable benchmark, the church is stretched thin, and the people there are no less precious to God for living where the gospel is scarce.

What This Asks of Us

It would be easy to read a saturation benchmark as a building program: plant more churches, raise the ratio, declare victory. But the gospel is not finally about ratios, and Keller’s numbers are a diagnostic, not a destiny. They help us notice where the church is present and where it is absent. What we do with that noticing is a matter of prayer, wisdom, and partnership, and it will look different in a dense urban core than in a fast-growing suburban division.

What the map asks of us, first, is honesty. It is tempting for those of us inside healthy, well-resourced churches to assume the whole region looks like our corner of it. The data quietly corrects that assumption. The body of Christ in Greater Austin is real and active, yet unevenly distributed across a region that has grown faster than the church has been able to keep pace with.

Jesus, “when he saw the crowds, had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). His response was not first a strategy but a prayer: that the Lord of the harvest would send out laborers. That is where an honest church map should lead us. Not to anxiety about numbers, and not to pride about our own congregations, but to compassion for the communities where the shepherds are few.

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In the next letter, we move from the church to the wider spiritual landscape, and to the most important distinction in this whole study: the difference between what people say they believe and how they actually live. Until then, would you pray for the communities of Greater Austin, where the church is thin, and ask the Lord of the harvest to send laborers there?

When the Greater Austin Mission Society was still just an idea at the beginning of 2025, we kept returning to one simple discipline: learning to think like missionaries in our own backyard. It is a strange thing to say about a place you have lived for years. Most of us do not feel like missionaries when we drive the same highways, shop at the same H-E-B, and drop our kids at the same schools we always have. Familiarity has a way of making a place invisible to us. We stop seeing it.

But a missionary cannot afford to stop seeing. When believers carry the gospel into a new culture, the first thing they do is not necessarily preach. It is often to learn. They study the language, the history, the rhythms of daily life, the hopes and fears of the people, and the ways God may already be at work before anyone arrived. Then they know how to love, serve, and speak well in a culture. We have come to believe that Austin now asks the same of us. The city we live in has changed so much, so fast, that loving it well requires us to study it again, as if for the first time.

Asset Mapping and the Posture It Requires

One of the exercises commonly commended when a worker enters a new context is called asset mapping. Rather than starting with everything that is broken or missing, asset mapping begins by taking honest stock of what is already present: the people, the institutions, the histories, and the signs of life that God has placed in a community. It is a posture of attention before action, of gratitude before strategy.

So that is where we started. We asked a deceptively simple question: what kind of information is publicly available that could give us insight into God’s activity across Greater Austin over time? We wanted to understand what was before we set out by faith to build what may be. We are committed to being Spirit-led and data-informed, and we do not think the two are in competition. Data does not replace prayer or discernment. It serves them. Numbers can tell you the shape of a city, but only the Spirit can tell you what to do about it.

There is a quiet humility built into this work. “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). We gather what we can see precisely because we know how much we cannot. The research is an act of attention, not control. It is us saying to the Lord, in effect, “Show us this city the way You see it, and make us willing to go where You are already moving.”

What We Set Out to Learn

Over the months that followed, our study took shape around four kinds of knowledge, and they form the backbone of the series you are beginning to read.

The first is demographic data. Using the United States Census Bureau’s American Community Survey five-year estimates, we examined the basic facts about who lives here: how the population has grown, how its makeup has changed, and what those shifts mean for the church. Austin is not the city it was even ten years ago, and the numbers make that undeniable.

The second is church and ministry data. This is the work closest to our own hands. We have been building a picture of the congregations and ministries across our region, their theological and denominational makeup, and their distribution across the distinct communities that make up Greater Austin. This lets us begin to see, however imperfectly, where the body of Christ is concentrated and where it is lacking.

The third is spiritual data. Drawing on organizations such as the Pew Research Center and Barna, we have tracked how people in this region identify spiritually, whether and how they practice any faith, and how those patterns have shifted over time. This is where the deepest story lives, because identification and practice are not the same thing, and the gap between them tells us a great deal.

The fourth is history and interviews. Data sits on top of stories. Over time, we want to enrich what the numbers say with the longer history of God’s work in this region and the testimony of leaders, saints, and cross-cultural workers who have seen things no spreadsheet can capture. That work will unfold across the life of this newsletter.

A Word About How We Hold the Numbers

Before we go further, a confession about the limits of what follows. Our church data comes largely from analyzing publicly available information, much of it from individual church websites. It is subject to error. The spiritual data carries meaningful margins of error, sometimes seven to nine points at the metro level. We will try to be honest about that throughout, and we will tell you where a number is firm and where it is a careful estimate.

We also want to resist two temptations that data tends to provoke. The first is despair, the sense that the trends are so heavy that nothing can be done. The second is triumphalism, the sense that if we just had the right plan, the city would turn. Neither is the posture of a missionary. The missionary looks squarely at a hard field and gets to work anyway because the field belongs to the Lord of the harvest, not to us.

Where We Are Going

Over the next several posts, we will walk through what we found, one piece at a time. We will look at how Austin has grown and changed. We will lay out the church map and what it suggests about gospel saturation. We will sit with the spiritual landscape and the slow erosion of practicing faith. We will compare Austin to the cities most like it, which may surprise you.

And then we will ask the only question that finally matters: so what? What is this data asking of the church in Austin, and of us?

I am glad you are here for it. As you read, would you do three things? Pray for eyes to see this city as God sees it. Share these letters with one person who loves Austin. And if you have not yet, subscribe, so the rest of the series finds its way to you.

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More soon!

If you have lived in Greater Austin for any length of time, you do not need a chart to tell you the city has changed. You feel it in the traffic, in the cranes on the skyline, in the names of neighborhoods that did not exist when you arrived, in the prices of homes that once seemed ordinary. But feeling a change and understanding it are different things, and one of the gifts of careful data is that it lets us trace the exact shape of what we have only sensed. So let us look at the numbers, because they are part of how God is teaching us to see this place.

A City That Doubled

Start with the simplest fact. Between 2008 and 2023, the Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos Metropolitan Statistical Area grew by more than fifty percent. Step back further, and the picture is even more striking: since the year 2000, the metro has roughly doubled in population. Today the region is home to somewhere around two and a half million people, which makes it the twenty-fifth largest metro in the country, and it is still growing, up about eleven percent since 2020 alone.

It is hard to overstate what that kind of growth does to a place. Doubling is not the same as getting bigger. A city that doubles becomes, in many respects, a different city. The institutions built for the old population, the churches and schools, and civic structures, were sized and shaped for a community that no longer exists. Much of what we will explore in this newsletter traces back to this single, stubborn fact: Austin grew faster than its institutions, including its churches, could adapt.

Growth on this scale is not a problem to be solved. It is a mission field arriving at our doorstep. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people move into this region carrying their own histories, hopes, wounds, and questions. Most of them are not coming to church. Many have never been. The Lord has gathered the nations into our metro, and the question for the church is whether we will see them.

A Changing Face

Growth is only half the story. The other half is who is doing the arriving, because Austin has not just grown larger. It has grown different.

Between 2013 and 2023, the region's ethnographic makeup shifted in clear directions. The share of residents identifying as White, as Black or African American, and as American Indian or Alaska Native each declined. At the same time, the share identifying as Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino, and more than one race each increased. In the most recent estimates, the metro is roughly half White (non-Hispanic), about a third Hispanic or Latino, around seven percent Asian, and around seven percent Black, with a median age near thirty-five and more than forty percent of adults holding a college degree.

Read those numbers slowly, because each one is a face. Austin is younger, more educated, more international, and more multiethnic than it was a generation ago. It is anchored by technology, government, and higher education, which means it draws ambitious, mobile, often skeptical people from across the country and the world. These are not the demographics of a settled, churched community. They are the demographics of a frontier.

What the Numbers Ask of the Church

For those of us who long to see Austin reached, this picture cuts two ways.

On the one hand, it is an extraordinary opportunity. The Great Commission sends the church to “all nations,” and in a real sense, the nations have come here. The diversity of language, culture, and background that missionaries once crossed oceans to reach now lives down the street. A church that learns to love its actual neighbors in this city is, without leaving home, participating in God's global mission.

On the other hand, it is a sobering challenge. A church culture built for a slower, more homogeneous, more nominally Christian Texas will not automatically connect with the city that has replaced it. Ministry strategies that worked when most newcomers already had a church background do not reach those with none. Reaching this Austin requires the patience, curiosity, and humility of cross-cultural mission, even when the city in question is the one we call home.

The Apostle Paul, writing to the Athenians, did not begin with condemnation. He began with attention. He had walked the city, observed its objects of worship, and even quoted its poets, and from that careful seeing he proclaimed the God who “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26). The God who set the boundaries of the nations also set the boundaries of our metro, and the people he has gathered here are no accident.

Holding This Honestly

A word on the data itself. These figures come from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey five-year estimates, which are among the most reliable population measures available, though they are estimates and not a perfect count. The broad direction, however, is not in doubt. Austin has grown dramatically and diversified meaningfully, and both trends show every sign of continuing.

In the next letter, we turn from who lives here to a question closer to our own work: where is the church in all of this? We will lay out what our study of congregations across the region revealed, and what it suggests about how thoroughly the gospel has taken root across Greater Austin.

Until then, would you pray for the hundreds of thousands the Lord has gathered into this city, and for a church awake enough to see them? And if these letters are helping you see Austin more clearly, share this one with someone who would want to see it too.

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Howdy!

My name is Todd Engstrom, and this is the first letter from the Greater Austin Mission Society. Thank you for being here! Before I tell you what we are building and what you can expect to find in your inbox, let me tell you how we got here.

How We Got Here

For nearly twenty years, I had the privilege of serving Jesus and His Church through The Austin Stone Community Church, most recently as Executive Pastor of Ministry Strategies.

In 2024, after a long season of both fruitful ministry and real personal suffering, the Lord led our family into a year of transition and trust. It was a wilderness, and it did what wildernesses tend to do. It exposed my self-reliance and reminded me that “the steps of a man are established by the Lord, and He upholds his hand” (Psalm 37:23-24).

Out of that season came a clearer calling. Rather than leaving Austin, Olivia and I sensed the Spirit asking us to stay rooted here and make ourselves available to the wider body of Christ, to help strengthen what God is already doing across our city and to build bridges of trust among churches, ministries, and leaders who too often work alone. That calling now has a name:

What is a Mission Society?

For centuries, followers of Jesus have joined hands across traditions and boundaries to carry the gospel further than any one congregation could alone. The Moravians, the London Missionary Society, the China Inland Mission, these were mission societies, bound not by a single denomination but by prayer, conviction, and the urgency of the Great Commission.

A church shepherds its members. A denomination provides shared governance. A nonprofit usually serves one cause. A mission society exists to equip and send God’s people into new frontiers, whether across the world or across the street, and seeks to sustain that work for the long haul.

We believe Austin needs that kind of effort. Our city has changed faster than almost any other in the country, and not only in size. By the most recent measures, fewer than one in six adults in our metro identifies as an evangelical Protestant, and more than a third claim no religious affiliation at all.

On the spiritual map, Austin now looks less like its Bible Belt neighbors and more like Denver or Portland. This is not cause for despair. It is a call to think and act like missionaries again, in the place we already call home.

What You Can Expect

This newsletter is where we will do that thinking out loud and invite you to join us. We are committed to being Spirit-led and data-informed, so we want to understand what is before we set out by faith to build what may be.

Our first series walks through our State of the City research: the demographic, church, and spiritual data we gathered to understand God’s activity across Greater Austin over time.

After that, we will publish prayer guides for each of our region’s Census County Divisions, the distinct communities that make up Greater Austin, so we can pray for this city region by region and neighborhood by neighborhood. Along the way, you will hear directly from cross-cultural workers sent out from Austin, who see our city with missionary eyes after years on the field abroad. And we will share longer essays on the questions we keep wrestling with: how the institutions that support the church are changing, what leadership development should look like in a harder cultural moment, and how generosity and trust actually move through a city.

I expect to write once every other week or so. Some pieces will be short. Some will be longer than they should be. All of them are an attempt to listen, gather, and serve, so that together we might see what God is doing here and join Him.

Will You Join Us?

There are three simple ways to walk with us:

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Share this with one person who loves Austin and longs to see it reached. A movement of prayer and partnership grows one relationship at a time:

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Pray for our churches, our leaders, and the millions of neighbors God has gathered in this city.