Congregation Growth Projection

This calculator builds its projection from current attendance, retention rate, and new visitors per month rather than from a separately entered growth percentage — the growth rate that actually plays out emerges from those three inputs rather than being set directly. Annual Growth Rate is there as a reference figure for comparing against your church's historical trend, but adjusting it alone won't move the projected numbers.

Attrition is calculated as a percentage of however large the congregation currently is, so as attendance grows, the raw number of people lost each year grows right along with it. New-visitor inflow, by contrast, stays fixed at whatever monthly figure you entered, so the two forces trend toward balancing out — a realistic reflection of how sustained numeric growth usually requires increasing the visitor pipeline over time, not just maintaining it.

It applies a standard rule-of-thumb doubling formula to the average annual growth rate implied by your projection, which is a reasonable approximation but not a precise compound-growth calculation. Because this model's growth rate naturally decelerates as attendance rises, actual time to double will typically run longer than this figure suggests if growth is already slowing within your projection window.

It's the seating capacity at which your projected attendance would represent about 80% occupancy — a commonly cited threshold where a room starts to feel full enough that continued growth becomes harder to sustain without more space. It's a planning target for when to consider expanding or adding a service, not the capacity you need immediately.