Where in the World is the Church of God?

By Mark-Phillip Pebworth & Daniel Russo

Data visualization and analysis are valuable tools to evaluate any endeavor. While we are not in control of who God calls and when, using data can help us better understand the Church of God’s (COG) history, our present circumstances, and perhaps even aid us in forecasting elements of its future.

This first analysis will dive into where COG congregations are worldwide and their relationship to geopolitics. This release will be the first of many and we hope that, by leveraging CGN’s unique datasets (and hopefully partnering with other organizations in the future), we will be able to look at our community from new vantage points and can arrive at insights that give us a greater understanding of the Church of God and its work.

To start off, the known Church of God consists of 1,515 congregations, and four main organization, each consisting of at least 80 congregations worldwide. Ordered by size, these are:

• the United Church of God (399 locations)
• the Living Church of God (393 locations)
• the Church of God, A Worldwide Association (233 locations)
• Church of God, International (87 locations).

Beyond this point, church organizations become too small to meaningfully analyze worldwide.  As such, we chose to look at these top 4 churches and lump the remaining Church of God organization together. These COG organizations are collectively referred to as “Smaller Groups”, and each include 40 or fewer congregations. However collectively, these smaller groups have a total of 392 congregations, comparable to the Living Church of God in congregational number.

The COG’s Worldwide Presence

a.

b.

Figure 1: Number of COG congregations in a country aligns with Cold War alliances. a, Countries are color-coded by the number of congregations found within that country. b, A map of cold war alliances [Wikimedia Commons]. Blue colors represent NATO or other allies, while shades red represent the Soviet Union’s various levels of alliances. Grey countries represent nominally non-aligned countries. Several supposedly unaligned countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Cote D’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Cameroon, had complex post-colonial relationships with NATO members England and France. This relationship is reflected in presence of COG congregations in those sub-Saharan states.

Four of the top six countries with the greatest COG presence are English speaking nations (Fig 1A, Fig 2). Given that we are largely based in the US, there is a noticeable and expected bias towards English speaking countries, specifically the US, Canada and Australia.

Known COG congregations almost exactly follow long-term geopolitical and religious boundaries. The number of congregations within a country follows Cold War-era lines (Fig 2b), with the number of congregations tracking very well Cold war-era alliances, evidenced by the congregations throughout Western Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. In comparison, former Soviet states, except for Estonia, have no documented congregations. Despite Christianity’s crushing under Soviet occupation, there remain robust mainstream Christian communities throughout Eastern Europe and the Caucuses. Likewise, Armenian and other Christian minorities exist in Israel and Turkey. It’s quite possible that there are in fact, COG congregations within those domains, but that we simply do not have contact with them.

There are many West African countries with large mainstream Christian communities, but no identifiable COG congregations. Examples of this pattern include Senegal, Liberia, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Central African Republic. In at least one case, Angola, we know that there are many COG congregations, which loosely affiliated with the United Church of God, but we have no access to congregational number or locations at the present time. Given the historical relationship between Angola, Namibia, and Botswana, there may also be congregations within Namibia and Botswana as well. Similarly, neighboring French-speaking Madagascar is home to a small number of COG members, as well as 500k to 1.5 million Sabbath-keeping Christians within the Apocalypses Church, which officially follows all the core tenants, except the Holy Days (Fath 2019). There may be more COG members there than we know, though communication is challenging. Finally, Kenya stands as a surprising outlier on the continent: It ranks as the 4th largest COG country by congregational number worldwide, before the Philippines and even Australia.

Moving on to East Asia, the complete absence of COG congregations within Taiwan, South Korea and Japan completely bucks the trend throughout the rest of the world. Despite the strong mainstream Christian presence in South Korea, we could not locate any COG congregations there. This stands in stark contrast to the Philippines, which has a very robust COG presence. Noticeably, the only known COG congregation in China is in Hong Kong.

Effect of Organizational Size

Figure 2: Comparing international presence between the Top 4 COG organizations and smaller independent fellowships.

When analyzing COG presence by organization worldwide, we noticed a clear relationship between COG size and country. For one, smaller organizations are nearly absent from non-English speaking countries. In fact, even the COG presence in South America and Europe is almost entirely due to the presence of the 4 largest groups, and the only non-English country with smaller fellowships was Mexico, adjacent to the US. This pattern could be due to language barriers or reflect historical patterns of American-based, English-speaking evangelism. For example, non-Anglophone countries may have historically received less evangelical focus due to language barriers and translation challenges. Alternatively, if an independent congregation sprang up organically in a non-English-speaking nation, it would be difficult for us to hear about it. In comparison, anglophone African countries, along with India and Australia, seem to be the common areas of awareness for CGN, or of emphasis for both larger and smaller COG organizations.

Limitations

All graphs around the number of congregations do not reflect the number of individuals attending in those congregations. Large skews could exist, and many of the listed congregations could be quite small. Finally, all the results are from self-reported congregation locations, largely from church websites. Self-reports are known to have some bias. These websites may or may not have been updated and may or may not reflect the truth on the ground.

Areas for Further Analysis

Access to data showing: 1) approximate congregation size and 2) where (and how) the COG is dedicating their Gospel preaching efforts would tell us way more than congregation location information alone. This is one area where Church of God Network would love to partner with Church organizations to gain greater insights and clarity into the work the COG is engaged in. It would also be valuable to analyze to what extent the pattern of dispersion outlined in the above analysis of the COG mirrors that of mainstream Christian denominations.

In our next data release, we will explore the possible effects of governmental repression and societal hostility on where COG congregations are located globally.

References

Sebastien Fath. Regardsprotestants.com. “Apokalypsy, a Malagasy postcolonial church.” Last modified August 17, 2019. https://regardsprotestants.com/actualites/francophonie/apokalypsy-une-eglise-postcoloniale-malgache/

Wikimedia Commons. “File: Cold War alliances mid-1975.” Last modified May 4, 2012. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cold_War_alliances_mid-1975.svg

Supplemental Figures

Supplemental Figure 1: Number of Congregations per Country Worldwide for the Church of God, A Worldwide Association

Supplemental Figure 2: Number of Congregations per Country Worldwide for the Church of God, International

Supplemental Figure 3: Number of Congregations per Country Worldwide for the Living Church of God

Supplemental Figure 4: Number of Congregations per Country Worldwide for the United Church of God

Supplemental Figure 5: Number of Congregations per Country Worldwide for Smaller COG Organizations (orgs with 40 or fewer congregations)