Church Landscape Review: Evolving Vision
Evolving Vision
Shifts in Mission Values & Focus in Boston New Churches 2014-2024
In a city like Boston, you would think that, over time, churches would be less apt to wear their faith on their sleeves. They would most likely go easy on the religious language. Perhaps focus less on traditional ministries and more on culturally appropriate issues. Wouldn’t they need to do that to survive?
A look at a large group of newer church communities in Boston over the last ten years challenges such conventional wisdom.
We would expect any church in the city over the last decade to have seen significant change, and these churches are no different. They experienced shifts in their values, demographic focus, and ministries:
Over time, their vision, mission, and values statements became deeper and clearer. By 2024, every church in our study explicitly named Jesus in their statements.
Churches went from targeting specific demographic groups to focusing on their existing relational networks.
They put less emphasis on welcome ministries and expanded children and youth ministries, counseling, and generational groups.
These are just a few findings of the Applied Research team at the Emmanuel Gospel Center in Evolving Vision: Shifts in Mission Values & Focus in Boston New Churches 2014-2024.
It’s part of the 2025 Church Landscape Review project, which revisits the churches the team had originally interviewed as church plants in a 2014 research study. That project involved in-depth interviews with a diverse group of new churches from different denominations, ethnic groups, and networks.
Ten years later, EGC revisited the 2014 snapshot and re-interviewed almost two dozen of the original churches to explore how the Boston-area church landscape has evolved over the past decade.
Like other reports in the project, Evolving Vision includes data, commentary, reflection questions, as well as next steps for ministry leaders.
Visit the Church Landscape Review project page for more information about the methods, participants, and terminology used in the study. There you will also find a series of reports we’re releasing periodically throughout 2025:
Pressed But Not Crushed
