Question. Hadaway’s “Faith Communities Today 2005” survey is the empirical backbone of hadaway-19-feature-growing-vs-dying-comparison. Twenty-one years later (2026), are the same 19 features still predictive? Has any feature inverted (e.g., are drum-based contemporary services now associated with plateauing megachurches?), reversed direction (e.g., are highly liturgical traditional services now experiencing a younger-generation revival?), or lost predictive power?
Why it matters. Hendricks’s prescriptive use of Hadaway depends on the features being stable predictors over time. If the church-growth literature of 2010–2025 has revised the picture, UC strategic recommendations based on 2005 features may be optimizing for last decade’s growth pattern. Several plausible inversions to check:
- Megachurch fatigue: post-2010 literature documents leveling-off of the contemporary-megachurch growth trend; many high-production-value services are now plateaued or declining.
- Liturgical revival: an observable Gen-Z/Millennial movement toward Eastern Orthodox, Latin Mass Catholic, and high-Anglican worship as reaction against contemporary-pop worship.
- Multi-racial mix: still strongly predictive but probably less novel as a marker.
Current best guesses. Probably about half the 19 features remain predictive, a quarter are noisy/inverted, and a quarter were never as predictive as the 2005 cut suggested (and were features of growing churches due to confound rather than cause). A more recent church-growth study would clarify. Pew Research, Hartford Seminary’s updated FACT studies, and Lifeway Research are candidate sources to ingest.
Source. Raised in br-04-populist-vs-denominational REVIEW, from hadaway-19-feature-growing-vs-dying-comparison.