The Negro's church,.

106

The Negro's Church

TABLE V-NUMBER OF CHURCHES STUDIED AND THEIR MEMBERSHIP IN 12 CITIES

City

Number of Churches
Studied

Atlanta..................
Baltimore................
Birmingham.............
Charleston...............
Chicago...............
Cincinnati...............
Detroit..................
Houston.................
Memphis...............
New Orleans.............
Philadelphia.............
Richmond...............
Total...............

49
50
55
50
56
51
44
50
51
51
50
52
609

Combined Membership
30,428
32,124
30,770
14,336
56,189
20,414
30,671
19,513
22,374
11,769
59,469
29,112
357,169

Average Number
per Church
621.0
642.5
559.5
286.7
1003.4
400.3
697.1
390.3
438.7
230.8
1189.4
559.8
586.5

A total of 609 churches with a combined membership of
357,169 makes an average of 586.5 members per church.
The average number of members per church as revealed by
the present study is believed to be more than average for
Negro churches generally. A closer approximation to the
average membership is the 220 members per church which is
reported in the Federal Census of Religious Bodies. This
preference for the census figures is supported by the fact that
in each of the twelve cities included in this study, the very
small churches are far more numerous than the large or the
very large ones, and this means that of the fifty churches,
more or less, studied in each of the twelve cities, proportionately more of the large churches were studied than of the
small or very small ones. A few churches reporting exceptionally large memberships would probably make the sample
somewhat weighty at the upper end. For example, Philadelphia reports a church that claims 12,000 members. It would
take 120 small churches with 100 members each to equal that
one church. The general membership of the 609 churches,
though representative of the 609, could hardly be accepted
as representative of the average membership per church on
the basis of the total number of churches in the twelve cities.