Embrace Church

Embrace Church started on September 4, 2006, when 32 people gathered for a worship service in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Adam Weber, then finishing his Master of Divinity at Asbury Theological Seminary, became the official pastor in July 2007 and has led the church ever since. Embrace is United Methodist, planted with help from Cornerstone UMC in Watertown and the Dakotas Conference, though it keeps the denominational label off the sign on purpose. The strategy worked. Outreach Magazine named it the 40th fastest-growing church in America in 2013, the only United Methodist congregation on the list, and it has topped lists of the fastest-growing UMC churches nationally.

Embrace runs three of the four major platforms and reaches 147,298 combined followers. Facebook is the anchor at 104,000 followers, unusually large for a church this size and a sign of deep regional roots. Instagram adds 36,598 followers on the @iamembrace handle. YouTube is the smallest channel at 6,700 subscribers, but it is moving fast, up 27.62 percent over the past year. The channel published as recently as June 8, 2026, so the cadence is current.

The story here is velocity. Embrace posts a 51.4 velocity score and an 82.5 breadth score, and that YouTube growth rate of 27.62 percent is one of the strongest in this stretch of the index. A church with a six-figure Facebook base and a fast-compounding YouTube channel is playing both sides of the demographic curve: the established audience that already follows them and the younger one they need next. The raw reach score of 32.7 is modest. The trajectory is not. If YouTube keeps growing at this clip, Embrace climbs.