89% of Iowans are not connected to an evangelical church.

Notes and sources

1. Source: NAMB Demographics Report for Send Network Iowa, Aug 2026. Demographic data: Esri 2026 estimates. Religious data: 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ARDA, corrected June 2023); tradition classification per ARDA (RELTRAD).↩Back to note 1 reference
2. The evangelical figures on this page are understated, because some evangelical churches were counted by the census without reporting how many people they serve — see note 3. Classification per ARDA’s tradition scheme (RELTRAD).↩Back to note 2 reference
3. 477 of Iowa’s 2,153 evangelical congregations were counted by the 2020 census but reported no adherent figures. Those churches are not spread evenly, so in the counties where they cluster, the share of people “not counted as adherents” comes out higher than the reality on the ground. Read those percentages as an upper bound. Congregation counts, on the other hand, are complete and add up exactly to the state total — which is why the map shades people per congregation rather than the percentage. Source: 2020 U.S. Religion Census (ARDA), county detail.↩Back to note 3 reference
4. “Counted as an adherent” is the census’s measure — it counts people a church can name, not people who hold evangelical convictions. Evangelical Protestant is ARDA’s classification, applied to the denomination rather than the congregation; nondenominational churches are counted evangelical. By self-identification (Pew Research, 2023–24), 31% of Iowans say they have no religion. The distance between those numbers — hundreds of thousands of Iowans who would call themselves Christian but are connected to no church — is a large part of the mission field. State comparisons: 2020 U.S. Religion Census; Pew Research Religious Landscape Study.↩Back to note 4 reference
5. Every state’s share on this map is understated, and not evenly. Nationally 22,611 evangelical congregations (11.3% of them) reported a congregation count but no adherent figure, so they contribute zero adherents to their state’s rate. Iowa is the 3rd most affected state, at 21.9% — so Iowa’s own figure is understated more than most of the states it is being compared against here. Giving each state’s non-reporting congregations that state’s own average size moves Iowa from 11.05% to roughly 14.2% and from rank 34 to 29, while Alabama slips from 1st to 3rd. Those adjusted figures are an upper bound and are not the published numbers — non-reporting churches skew small, so the correction overshoots. The ordering holds at the extremes; the middle of the map, where Iowa sits, is soft.↩Back to note 5 reference
6. The shortfall is counted county by county: for each county, one congregation per 1,000 residents, minus the congregations it already has, summed across the 58 counties that fall short. Counties already past the goal contribute nothing, and their surplus is not subtracted from anyone else’s gap, because a church in one county does not serve another. Running the same arithmetic on Iowa as a whole instead — one congregation per 1,000 residents statewide, minus its 2,153 congregations — gives a smaller figure, 1,038, because that version lets a surplus in a small rural county cancel a shortfall in Polk. The gap between the two is the whole point. One congregation per 1,000 people is the Global Alliance for Church Multiplication’s stated saturation goal (https://gacx.io/about) — a goal for global evangelization, not an empirical benchmark, and no accepted standard for how many churches a population needs exists.↩Back to note 6 reference