The Churches List Letter
Stories that sit behind the directory.
Long-form pieces on patterns across 334,554 American parishes — how denominations cluster by region, which buildings outlived their congregations, and what a census tract can tell you about a Sunday morning.
Rural United States
Small-Town America's Single-Parish Towns: Where One Church Holds the Whole Community
Churches List records 8,920 American towns where a single Christian parish serves the entire community. 42% are in the Great Plains, and 35% are Methodist. The grid is thinning by 1.5% per year as rural depopulation closes one or two parishes a week.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh's 721 Parishes and the Industrial Catholic Arc: Slovak, Polish, Italian, and German Congregations
Pittsburgh holds 721 parishes, with 180 Roman Catholic and at least 25 Eastern-Rite (Byzantine) Catholic parishes clustered around former steel-mill neighbourhoods. The parish names still read as a census of the 1890–1920 industrial workforce.
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles's 1,043 Parishes: The Most Denominationally Varied Grid in the American West
Los Angeles holds 1,043 parishes inside the city limits and more than 15 distinct traditions each hold at least 25 parishes, making LA the most denominationally varied grid in any American city west of Chicago.
Dallas-Fort Worth
Dallas (953) vs. Fort Worth (243): Two Metros, One Baptist Heritage, Very Different Sunday Grids
Dallas holds 953 parishes inside its city limits; Fort Worth, 30 miles west and nearly equal in population, holds 243. The four-to-one gap reflects two different Protestant settlement histories layered on the same North Texas prairie.
United States
The Non-Denominational Acceleration: 35,730 American Congregations With No Central Authority
Non-Denominational congregations now outnumber the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Episcopal Church combined. The tradition has grown at 8% per year since 1990, a rate no historic American denomination has matched.
Upper Midwest
Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas: Why the Upper Midwest Holds 36% of American Lutheran Congregations
Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the two Dakotas hold 4,034 Lutheran congregations, 23% of the American Lutheran total. Extended to include Iowa and Nebraska, the Upper Midwest Lutheran share climbs to roughly 36% of all American Lutheran parishes.
Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham's 276 Baptist Congregations: The Most Baptist City Per Capita in the United States
Birmingham records 276 Baptist congregations inside the city limits, a 52% share of all parishes, and the highest Baptist-per-capita count of any American city with a population above 200,000. The density reflects the steel-era SBC plantings and the continuing Black Baptist civil-rights-era network.
United States
The Episcopal Atlantic Corridor: Where the Church Stays Most Densely Concentrated
The Episcopal Church USA records 8,112 parishes. The five largest state contingents — NY, CA, TX, PA, FL — together hold 32% of the national count, while the four colonial Anglican states (VA, MD, NC, SC) hold roughly 13%.
Brooklyn, New York
Brooklyn's 863 Parishes by Neighbourhood: Sunday Morning in the Most Densely Churched Borough
Brooklyn holds 863 parishes inside its borders, 12 per square mile, stacked in layers from the Dutch Reformed of the 1650s to the Fujianese evangelical congregations of the 2000s. Every neighbourhood is a different Sunday morning.
Ohio
Ohio's 1,278 Methodist Congregations: Why the Circuit System Still Maps the State
Ohio holds 1,278 Methodist and United Methodist congregations, the highest state Methodist density in the country. The grid traces to the 1790–1830 circuit-riding preachers who planted a meeting-house every twenty miles across the Ohio country.
United States
The Patron-Saint Portfolio: What Church Names Reveal About Where American Catholics Came From
American parishes carry 3,917 St. John dedications, 3,334 St. Paul, 2,347 St. Mary, 1,714 Our Lady, and 97 St. Stanislaus. Each name is an immigrant community's signature on its American doorpost.
New York State
The Catholic Parish Network of New York State: 2,264 Communities Across Eight Jurisdictions
New York State holds 2,264 Roman Catholic parishes, administered through eight distinct jurisdictions: the 1808-founded Archdiocese of New York, the 1853-founded Diocese of Brooklyn, the 1957-founded Diocese of Rockville Centre, and five upstate suffragans.
Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis's 297 Baptist Congregations: Inside the Densest Baptist City South of the Ohio River
Memphis records 297 Baptist congregations and only 42 Catholic parishes, a 7-to-1 ratio, because three overlapping Baptist networks (Southern Baptist, National Baptist, and Missionary Baptist) each built their own parish grid inside the city.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia's Row-Grid Parishes: William Penn's 1683 Plan and the 1,227 Churches Fitted Into It
Philadelphia holds 1,227 parishes inside the city limits, on a 1683 grid laid out by William Penn that predated every other American city plan except New Amsterdam's. The grid's narrow row-house lots determined what every later parish could look like.
Louisiana
The Louisiana Catholic Corridor: 764 Parishes and the French Colonial Map That Shaped Them
Louisiana records 764 Roman Catholic parishes in the Churches List directory, a concentration unique south of the Ohio. The southern two-thirds of the state still sits on the French colonial mission grid laid out between 1699 and 1763.
Manhattan, New York
New York City's Pre-Civil-War Catholic Parishes Still Open on Sunday
Seven Roman Catholic parishes in Manhattan whose present buildings predate 1860 still offer Sunday Mass, from Saint Peter's (1840) on Barclay Street to Ascension (1897) on the Upper West Side.
Houston, Texas
Houston's 504 Baptist Congregations: How One Metro Holds the Densest Baptist Presence in Texas
Houston holds 504 Baptist congregations inside its city limits, the densest Baptist presence of any American metro: a 1848 Southern Baptist mission layer, a 1945 Independent Baptist suburban layer, and a 1920 Black Baptist migration layer stacked on the same coastal plain.
United States
The Baptist–Lutheran Inversion: Where the Two Traditions Trade Places on the Lower-48 Map
American Baptist (74,720 congregations) and American Lutheran (17,216) divide the lower 48 along a diagonal from Mobile to Fargo: nine states are Lutheran-dominant, and the rest are Baptist-dominant by four-to-one ratios or wider.
Chicago, Illinois
Why Chicago's 1,875 Parishes Outnumber Any Midwestern City — and Which Denominations Hold the Grid
Chicago holds 1,875 parishes inside the city limits, the highest count of any Midwestern city: 347 Baptist, 251 Catholic, and 232 Non-Denominational congregations anchor a grid shaped more by the Great Migration than by Chicago's income map.
Detroit, Michigan
Detroit's 1850–1900 Catholic Stone Belt: Six Parishes Whose Cornerstones Survive
Six Detroit Catholic parishes built between 1848 and 1897 still operate in the Archdiocese of Detroit, anchoring Corktown, the East Side, and Southwest Detroit through 150 years of industrial rise and population collapse.