This spring we did something a little obsessive. We took the Southern Baptist Convention's public church directory, all 37,293 congregations of it, and checked every single one for a working website.
Here is what we found.
18,286 churches, 49 percent, have no website at all. Not an ugly one. None. If a young family searches for them on a Tuesday night, they find a directory listing from a denominational database, maybe an unclaimed map pin, and nothing else.
Another 4,780 have a website that no longer works. Almost two thousand of those are dead domains: the church once paid for a site, someone built it, and then the domain lapsed or the hosting quit and nobody noticed. The rest fail in quieter ways: security certificates that expired years ago, pages that return errors, sites that simply time out.
That leaves about 14,000 churches with a site that loads. Loading is not the same as living. We spot-checked hundreds of them and found sermon pages whose newest sermon was from 2020, committee lists from two rebuilds ago, and service times that members told us were wrong.
Why this matters more than it used to
The research on churchgoing is blunt about this. Around half of first-time guests look a church up online before they ever pull into the parking lot, and what they are looking for is not clever. Service times. Directions. Whether there is something for their kids. A photo or two that tells them what to wear and who they will be sitting with.
When the answer to that search is nothing, or a page that says the wrong time, the visit often just does not happen. Nobody calls the church office to double-check. They were never rude enough to tell you they almost came.
It is not a laziness problem
Here is the part we feel strongly about, because we talked to these churches while building for them. The half without websites are not indifferent. They are congregations of forty and seventy people where the pastor also drives the bus, and the one member who knew computers moved to Huntsville. The dead-domain churches actually PAID for a website once. They demonstrated the willingness. What failed them was everything after launch: the updates, the renewals, the login in a drawer nobody can find.
Websites, as the industry builds them, assume someone at the church has time to fuss over a dashboard. Half of this denomination has no such person. That is not a training gap. That is a product gap.
What we did about it
We build and keep websites for exactly these churches. The church never logs into anything: when something changes, someone emails the website in plain words, "worship moves to 10:30 this Sunday," and the site fixes itself in about a minute, with a confirmation back and an undo if the week was typed wrong. It costs less than the flowers by the pulpit.
But whether or not a church ever uses us, we think the number deserves to be known. 18,286 congregations are invisible to the people trying to find them this Sunday. If you sit on an association staff, publish a newsletter, or care about small churches, you are welcome to cite these figures.
Method: counts from the public SBC church directory (37,293 rows), checked programmatically in April 2026 and re-verified on sample in July 2026; "no website" means no URL listed and none discoverable, "broken" means DNS failure, certificate failure, connection failure, or an error status at fetch time. Questions about the data: start@parson.church.