Walk through almost any city in Ghana, Nigeria, the Philippines, Brazil, or South Korea, and you will pass several church buildings within a few streets of each other, often each one led by a different pastor with a different name over the door. This raises a fair question that many worshippers ask honestly, without hostility to faith itself: if everyone is worshipping the same God, why do new churches keep starting instead of growing the ones already there?
This article looks at what sociologists of religion, church researchers, and historians have actually documented about this pattern, separates it from unproven claims, and explains a few jargon terms along the way in simple English. (Updated with research through mid-2026, including newly released pastoral-attrition data and a resolved Korean succession case.)
First, a needed distinction: denomination, schism, and church plant
Before going further, three terms get used loosely and mean different things.
| Term | What it actually means | Simple example |
|---|---|---|
| Denomination | A distinct organised group of churches sharing the same structure, doctrine, and leadership, such as the Methodists or the Assemblies of God | The Methodist Church as a worldwide body |
| Schism | A split, where part of an existing church or denomination breaks away to form a new, separate one, usually after a dispute | A group of Methodist churches leaving to form the Global Methodist Church |
| Church plant | A brand new congregation started from scratch, not by splitting from an existing one, often to reach an unreached area or population | A pastor starting a new congregation in a growing suburb with no existing church |
Sociologists studying this field, writing in the Encyclopedia of Religion, describe schism as the process by which a religious body divides to become two or more distinct, independent bodies, usually because one side comes to see the other as too different, doctrinally or organisationally, to remain one family [1]. New church formation, in other words, is not always the same event. Sometimes it is expansion into new ground. Sometimes it is a family quarrel that ends in separation.
The academic theory behind why this keeps happening
1. A widely used framework: the church-sect cycle
One of the oldest tools in the sociology of religion is what scholars call the church-sect typology, developed from the work of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch in the early twentieth century.
The theory observes a repeating pattern. A small, intense religious group, called a sect, forms in tension with the wider society or with an established church. Over time, as it grows, gains members, and becomes respectable, it starts to compromise and accommodate the wider culture, becoming more church-like. Once it becomes an established institution, it in turn becomes exposed to new breakaway challenges from within [2].
Researchers in this tradition argue the driving force behind this cycle is not mainly doctrine, but social factors such as class, ethnicity, and the tension between the poor and the established, which is why sects have historically been described as arising from the religious dissatisfaction of the less powerful [2].
In plain terms, this theory says new church formation is not a one-time event but a recurring cycle that has repeated across centuries and across religious traditions, not only in Christianity.
2. The “religious market” explanation
A more recent and heavily debated theory, associated with the American sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, treats religious life the way an economist treats a marketplace. This is sometimes called religious economies theory.
The theory argues that religious groups behave somewhat like competing organisations trying to attract and keep members, described in the jargon as religious suppliers meeting the demand of religious consumers [3]. Its central claim is counterintuitive: rather than many competing churches weakening faith by confusing people, Stark and Finke’s research found that a more open and pluralistic religious environment tends to produce higher overall levels of religious participation, not lower, because each group has an incentive to specialise and appeal strongly to a particular segment of people [4].
This theory is genuinely contested among scholars. Critics argue that describing churches as “firms” competing for “market share,” and believers as “consumers” with religious “portfolios,” risks reducing something spiritual to something transactional [3]. It is presented here as a documented academic position, not as an endorsement of viewing religion this way.
3. Historical roots going back to the Reformation
New church formation on a large scale is not a recent or uniquely African or Asian phenomenon. Researchers researching the topic trace the origin of large scale church multiplication to the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther’s challenge to the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century led to the formation of the Lutherans, and, in the centuries that followed, the Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals, and many independent churches [5].
In other words, the pattern of believers forming new, separate congregations rather than staying inside one structure is roughly five hundred years old and began in Europe, long before it became associated with Africa or Asia.
The documented, practical reasons pastors start new churches
Academic theory explains the pattern in the abstract. Field research on actual pastors and congregations gives more concrete reasons.
Conflict inside the existing church — updated with 2025 data. The most recent Lifeway Research study, surveying 730 former senior pastors across four U.S. denominations (Assemblies of God, Church of the Nazarene, The Wesleyan Church, and the Southern Baptist Convention), asked directly what caused pastors to step down. The single most common reason, cited by 40 percent, was a personal sense that God was calling them elsewhere, not conflict.
Church conflict was the second most common reason, but only at 18 percent, followed by burnout (16 percent), family issues (10 percent), and personal finances (10 percent) [6]. Only about 3 percent tied their exit to a moral or ethical failure [6a].
That is a meaningfully different picture from a related but separate question the same research organisation has asked before. An earlier Lifeway survey found that seven in ten pastors said they had dealt with some conflict at a previous church at some point, and 39 percent described experiencing a significant personal attack — but this was a measure of whether conflict had ever occurred, not of why a pastor actually left [6b]. It is important to keep these two figures separate: most pastors who experience conflict do not leave over it, and most pastors who leave do not cite conflict as the main reason.
Overall pastoral attrition itself remains low and stable — around 1.1 to 1.2 percent of U.S. Protestant pastors leave the pastorate in a given year for reasons other than retirement or death, a rate essentially unchanged since 2015 [6c]. Not every pastor who experiences conflict starts a new church, but this data shows conflict is a real, if secondary, backdrop to some pastors leaving.
Leadership succession disputes. In South Korea, home to some of the largest Protestant congregations in the world, a documented and closely tracked pattern involves succession, meaning what happens to a church’s leadership when its founding pastor steps down. Academic research tracking this practice found that 159 Korean churches completed a hereditary succession, passing the pulpit to a family member, between 1970 and 2009, and a further 205 churches did so between 2010 and 2018 alone — roughly double the earlier rate [7].
One especially documented case involved Myungsung Presbyterian Church in Seoul, founded in 1980 with twenty members and grown to more than 100,000 registered members, where the founding pastor’s son was installed as his successor in 2017, triggering a formal denominational court case, protests by hundreds of pastors, and a boycott by theology students [8].
That dispute is now resolved: after years of litigation and a reversal by the church’s own denomination, South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled in March 2023 in the son’s favour, upholding his position and effectively ending the legal fight, though the episode remains a widely cited case study in how succession battles can split congregations and denominations [9].
Researchers studying this pattern describe succession battles, rather than a search for God, as a major driver of division and new congregation formation among Korean megachurches specifically [10].
Economic and entrepreneurial incentives. Academic research on Nigeria’s Pentecostal landscape has documented a phenomenon researchers there call “pastorpreneurship,” a jargon term meaning the treatment of church planting as a business venture, and has linked it to unemployed graduates opening their own churches because they see the church as what one peer reviewed study describes plainly as “a recruiting business” [11].
A separate academic paper on church proliferation in Nigeria concluded that the rise in new churches cannot be explained by claims of divine calling alone, and identified other, non-religious factors behind the trend [12]. This is a documented finding from published research, not an unproven accusation against any specific church or pastor.
A genuine and separate motive: reaching new areas. Not every new church exists because of conflict or ambition. Church planting research from Ghana’s Church of Pentecost documents a real practical problem: in rural and semi-urban parts of the country, there are often simply not enough trained local leaders to grow existing congregations into new areas, and new indigenous congregations, led by newly raised local leaders, are seen by researchers as a deliberate solution to that shortage rather than a symptom of division [13].
This distinction matters. A new church started to reach a community with no existing congregation nearby is a different phenomenon from a new church formed by a walkout after a leadership dispute, even though both result in “another new church.”
What the data shows about the scale of this in Africa and Asia
Nigeria has seen especially fast growth in independent and Pentecostal churches since the late twentieth century. One of Nigeria’s best documented cases is the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), which researchers cited by the Pew Research Center found grew from an estimated 42 congregations in 1980 to around 7,000 by 2004 [14].
That growth has continued sharply since: the church’s own leadership has reported more than 32,000 parishes in Nigeria alone by the mid-2010s, and more recent tallies put the global count at over 50,000 parishes across close to 200 countries, with membership estimated in the millions worldwide [15].
These more recent, larger figures come primarily from the church’s own reporting and affiliated sources rather than independent audits, so they should be read as the organisation’s own account of its growth rather than an externally verified count.
Academic research on Nigeria’s religious landscape also documents that thousands of Pentecostal churches have sprung up in the country since 1970, with a further wave of fast growing independent churches gaining ground from 1986 onward [16].
Ghana has a documented academic literature specifically studying church planting models in the country’s Pentecostal missions, with researchers there identifying a shortage of trained local leaders, rather than division, as the central obstacle and driver of new congregation formation in rural areas [13].
South Korea built what religion researchers have called the megachurch capital of the world, but sociologists studying Korean Protestantism describe overall Protestant growth there as stagnant, partly because money laundering scandals and succession disputes have damaged public trust [17].
It is worth updating the comparison with the Catholic Church that is sometimes drawn here: Catholic membership in South Korea did grow for years even as Protestant numbers plateaued, but the most recent data, covering 2025, shows that Catholic growth has itself slowed sharply, to just 0.2 percent for the year, down from 0.5 percent the year before, alongside falling Mass attendance and a steep decline in new priests and seminarians [18].
A 2025 national survey found 20 percent of South Koreans identify as Protestant and 11 percent as Catholic, with 51 percent reporting no religion at all [19].
In other words, the earlier framing of Catholic growth as a steady counterpoint to Protestant stagnation is now itself dated; both traditions are facing headwinds, and it is South Korea’s overall move toward no religious affiliation, more than a shift between denominations, that best explains the trend today.
The claim behind the question: is the number of churches evidence against belief in one God
The framing behind this question often draws on a specific statistic worth checking directly: the claim that there are “33,000” or even “40,000” different Christian denominations worldwide, sometimes used to argue that Christianity is hopelessly and uniquely fractured.
This claim needs to be handled carefully, because it is a documented case of statistics being real but badly misused.
What is actually documented: The number does trace back to a real academic source, the World Christian Encyclopedia, a large reference project that has tracked global Christian bodies since the 1980s. Its 2001 edition put the figure at over 33,000 [20].
What is myth or misleading, clearly separated: The claim that this means 33,000 doctrinally distinct, competing churches is not an accurate reading of the source’s own methodology.
The encyclopedia’s counting method treats the same denomination as a separate entry in each of the roughly 238 countries where it operates, meaning, for example, that the Roman Catholic Church, a single body under one Pope, is counted as 238 separate “denominations” simply because it exists in 238 countries [21].
Independent, single congregation churches with fewer than 100 members are also each counted as their own denomination in this system, alongside entirely separate faith families such as Eastern Orthodoxy [22].
Once this counting method is understood, the number of denominations that are actually doctrinally distinct from one another shrinks dramatically, with estimates for genuinely separate protestant traditions ranging much lower, closer to a few dozen major families such as Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Pentecostal, once the true methodology is accounted for [23].
The honest, documented answer is that Christianity does have real and significant divisions, some driven by genuine doctrinal disagreement going back centuries, but the specific “33,000” or “40,000” figure, as popularly used, overstates the picture and should be treated as a myth in its popular form, even though it comes from a real source.
Weighing it honestly: expansion happens too, not only division
It would be inaccurate to present church multiplication as only ever a story of conflict or ambition. Existing denominations do expand, merge, and grow their own branches without splitting.
The most current academic tracking of pastoral departures confirms this: as noted above, only around 1.1 to 1.2 percent of Protestant pastors in the denominations studied leave the ministry each year, and the single largest reason given, at 40 percent, is a personal sense of a changed calling rather than any conflict at all [6][6c].
Denominational mergers also happen, and the same research literature notes that some new congregations are explicitly designed as growth strategies within a single organised church, rather than as breakaways from it [13].
Summing up what is documented versus what remains contested
Documented and supported by published research:
- New church formation is not new, unique to Africa or Asia, or evidence of a special crisis in one region; it dates to the Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe and has continued in cycles ever since [5][2].
- Internal conflict, succession disputes, and economic incentive are all documented, researched drivers of some new church formation, alongside genuine, non-divisive reasons such as reaching underserved areas — but 2025 data shows conflict is a secondary reason pastors leave, well behind a change in personal calling [6][7][11][13].
- The “33,000 denominations” figure is real, but its popular interpretation is a documented statistical myth once the source’s own counting method is examined [20][21][22].
- The high-profile Myungsung succession dispute in South Korea, long cited as an open, unresolved controversy, was settled by the South Korean Supreme Court in 2023 in favour of the succession [9].
Contested, theoretical, or unproven, and should be treated as such:
- Whether religious competition, described in “religious market” theory, is genuinely good for faith or reduces it to a commercial transaction is an active academic and theological debate, not a settled fact [3][4].
- Any claim about the specific motive, sincere or self-interested, behind any single, named pastor or church not covered by the studies cited above is not something this article can verify and should not be assumed either way.
- The largest recent RCCG parish and membership figures come mainly from the church’s own reporting rather than independent verification, and should be read with that caveat [15].
Disclaimer: this article summarises published sociological, historical, and survey research about church formation as a broad social and organisational pattern. It does not make a theological judgement about which church, denomination, or leader is spiritually legitimate, and it does not accuse any individual person or congregation not directly named in the cited research of wrongdoing.
References
[1] Schism: An Overview, Encyclopedia.com
[2] Sociological classifications of religious movements, Wikipedia
[3] Rational choice: Why monotheism makes sense, The Christian Century
[4] Rodney Stark, Hartford Institute for Religion Research
[5] A Critical Analysis of Proliferation of Churches in Nigeria, Academia.edu
[6] Former Pastors Share Reasons Behind Their Ministry Exit, Lifeway Research, Aug 2025
[6a] Why Pastors Step Down: Lifeway Research Reveals the Most Common Reasons, ChurchLeaders, 2026
[6b] Few Pastors Left the Pulpit Despite Increased Pressure, Lifeway Research, 2021
[6c] Pastors Remain Committed to the Pulpit, Lifeway Research, May 2025
[8] Korean Megachurches Debate If Pastors’ Kids Can Inherit Pulpits, Christianity Today
[9] Myungsung Presbyterian Church, Wikipedia — 2023 Supreme Court resolution
[12] A Critical Analysis of Proliferation of Churches in Nigeria, Academia.edu
[14] Historical Overview of Pentecostalism in Nigeria, Pew Research Center
[15] The Redeemed Christian Church Of God (RCCG): A Comprehensive Overview, 2025; Redeemed Christian Church of God, Irish Council of Churches
[16] Church proliferation and immorality in Nigeria: Interrogating the paradox
[18] Korean Catholics hit 6 million, confront aging, declining vocations, UCA News, April 2026
[19] Religion in South Korea, Wikipedia — citing 2025 Korea Research survey
[20] World Christianity, Wesleyan University
[21] How many Protestant denominations
[22] The 33,000 Denominations Myth, Alpha and Omega Ministries
