For twenty years, the church world has ranked itself by one number: how many people show up on Sunday.
Outreach 100 does that well. But attendance stopped being the whole story a long time ago. The average person checks out your church online for weeks before they ever park in your lot. Some churches preach to a few thousand in the room and a few million in the feed.
Nobody was measuring that. So we did.
Today we’re launching the Church Influence 100: the definitive, data-driven ranking of the most influential churches online. Not the biggest buildings. Not the most famous pastors. The churches reaching the most people where people actually are.
What We Measured
We started with a research pool of more than 150 churches across 15 countries, then collected real platform data for every official account they operate: YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
Every church gets an Influence Score from 0 to 100, built on three pillars:
| Pillar | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Reach | 50% | Combined audience across all four platforms |
| Velocity | 30% | Growth rate and active viewership over the past year |
| Breadth | 20% | Active presence across platforms, posting recency |
Two rules matter more than anything else in the methodology.
First: churches, not pastors. Steven Furtick’s personal accounts dwarf most churches on earth. They don’t count. Official church-operated accounts do, including worship and youth brands. Elevation Worship counts toward Elevation Church because the church built it and runs it. Your pastor’s personal platform walks out the door when he does. The church’s platform stays.
Second: nobody can pay for placement. Not now, not ever. The score is math on public data, and the full methodology is published for anyone to check.
The 2026 Top 10
| Rank | Church | Location | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elevation Church | Matthews, NC | 100 |
| 2 | Bethel Church | Redding, CA | 89.7 |
| 3 | Lakepointe Church | Rockwall, TX | 87.9 |
| 4 | Life.Church | Edmond, OK | 87.7 |
| 5 | City Harvest Church | Singapore | 86.7 |
| 6 | Hillsong Church | Sydney, Australia | 85.1 |
| 7 | The Belonging Co | Nashville, TN | 84.4 |
| 8 | Dunamis International Gospel Centre | Abuja, Nigeria | 83.8 |
| 9 | Gateway Church | Southlake, TX | 80.8 |
| 10 | Calvary Temple | Hyderabad, India | 80.7 |
Four of the top 10 are outside the United States. A church in Singapore outranks Hillsong. A church most American pastors have never heard of in Abuja, Nigeria outranks Gateway. Online influence does not respect the old map.
The Surprises
The biggest churches are not the most influential churches.
Lakewood Church, America's largest sanctuary, lands at #20. Lakepointe Church, with a fraction of the attendance, lands at #3, because its YouTube audience grew over 600 percent in a year. Momentum beats legacy in this index, on purpose.
You’ll find churches on this list with a few hundred people on Sunday and six-figure online audiences. You’ll find giants coasting on followings they built five years ago and haven’t grown since. The full list tells the truth that attendance numbers hide: influence is earned through consistency, and it can be lost the same way.
We published the full breakdown of what the data shows in our companion study, The State of Church Social Media 2026.
If Your Church Made the List
Congratulations. You earned it, and you should tell people. Every ranked church has a profile page with an embeddable badge. Grab yours, put it on your website, and share your rank. Find your church on the full list and the badge embed code is right on your profile.
If Your Church Didn’t
Good. Now you know what’s possible.
Every church in the top 100 does the same unglamorous thing: they show up in the feed, every week, in formats people actually watch. Sermon clips. Carousels. Reels. Consistency over years.
That’s not a talent problem. It’s a capacity problem. Most churches don’t have a video editor, a designer, and a social media manager on staff. That’s literally the gap our social media management service exists to fill: we create and post everything, every week, for your church.
Want a presence worth ranking?
Get a free review of your church's online presence and see exactly where you stand.
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