Church Growth in Times of Secularization: A Case Study of People Joining Evangelical Congregations in the Netherlands

Background Today the Dutch religious landscape is characterized by two opposite trends. On the one hand, there is a massive and dominant trend of religious disaffiliation which mostly affects the Roman Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant churches, while on the other hand the Netherlands also witnesses the emergence of several independent, evangelical congregations of near megachurch size. Purpose Against the background of these opposite trends, this paper focuses on the second trend and tries to explain why some people join an evangelical congregation. Methods For this purpose, quantit... Mehr ...