In Utah, former Latter-day Saints are helping to fuel the growth of this Christian denomination

For years, Christianity in the United States has been shrinking faster than a snowball in the St. George sun, with a recently uncovered stalling expected to offer only a temporary reprieve.

Just how steep has the drop-off been? According to the Pew Research Center, the number of adults who identify as Christian has gone from 9 in 10 in the early 1990s to 6 in 10 today — a plunge paralleled by a simultaneous rise in those who do not identify with any religion.

With a notable exception.

Aside from a dip during COVID-19, the Assemblies of God have been quietly adding more and more members to their ranks at a seemingly unparalleled clip within the market of Christian denominations — a fact Eastern Illinois University political scientist Ryan Burge came to after rifling through the denomination’s own reporting.

Founded in 1914 in Arkansas, the faith does not provide specific numbers for Utah, but interviews with pastors suggest a similar trend is taking place in the Beehive State, with new faces popping up in pews from Tooele to Tremonton each Sunday.

This statewide growth comes despite the Assemblies of God recording an overall decline of about a quarter of its membership in the Rocky Mountain region over the past decade and appears to be partly fueled by disaffection among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“We started with seven families in 2017,” said Uale Tago, pastor of Salt Lake Samoan Assembly of God, “and now we’re up to 27 families — old and young, some move-ins from out of state, some who were already living here and some converts from the LDS Church.”

‘We haven’t spent anything on advertising’

Writing in his newsletter, Graphs About Religion, Burge tracked the faith’s growth from 2.5 million in the late 1990s to around 3.2 million just before the pandemic.

As with many other denominations, the protracted global crisis came paired with a steep slide for the faith known for its lively worship, although data for the years since has pointed toward a rebound to just shy of 3 million as of 2023.

Worship attendance, meanwhile, has mirrored this rise, slip and subsequent uptick to land right around 1.8 million as of 2023 — compared to a little more than 1.5 million in the late 1990s and right around 2 million in 2019.

Sam Markham has witnessed this appetite for the faith’s Pentecostal-flavored services since opening the River of Life Church in his native Tremonton in 2017. Since then, the pastor said, the number of congregants has jumped from a weekly average of 10 to 15 to around 100.

“We haven’t spent anything on advertising,” he said. “It’s all been word of mouth.”

To be clear, Markham said, most don’t show up at his church’s door seeking out an Assemblies of God church specifically. Rather, he speculated, they’re drawn to its “big umbrella” approach to Christianity and jeans-friendly atmosphere, whirring with religious energy, from clapping to speaking in tongues.

All in all, Markham estimates that a third of the newcomers are former Latter-day Saints. Others include those with Baptist and nondenominational backgrounds — and a mix of locals as well as move-ins.

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T-shirts, tattoos and smoke machines

This emphasis on a laid-back, everyone-is-welcome environment came up repeatedly in interviews with Assemblies of God pastors across Utah as they reached for answers to explain the steady expansion they had witnessed since — and, in some cases, preceding — the pandemic.

Ken Krueger, who leads The Mountain Church in Sandy, said newcomers find his tattoos and proclivity for T-shirts, jeans and hair dye “relatable.” At the same time, the God he preaches about is one “who doesn’t require you to get cleaned up before he loves you.”

The 47-year-old grew up in the congregation that his father pastored before him. In that time, he has seen attendance swell from around 150 to between 250 and 300. The new faces, he said, are young and include a slew of parents looking for community and a place to raise their kids. He estimated that 80% are former Latter-day Saints looking for a new church home, often years after having broken with their previous faith.

Among them was a young man who said he “kind of grew up LDS” and was looking at possibly reengaging with faith.

He told me: “‘I’m not there yet, but I’m getting there, and I really appreciate that I feel safe in a place like this to be there.‘”

The smoke machines, guitars and drums, Krueger added, probably don’t hurt attendance either.

A culture shift

Rich Wooten, pastor of Life Church, has another hypothesis about what is pumping up the pews: social media.

Since the pandemic, the bearded faith leader, who favors button-downs when preaching, has watched the Tooele and West Valley City campuses grow a collective 20%, give or take. And while Wooten has seen a fair share of former Latter-day Saints join the ranks, he also has found that a good number of the additions are young people with virtually no faith background.

“Famous influencers and celebrities have become more bold in their faith,” Wooten observed, “and I think it’s just become more acceptable to be open about your faith.”

This culture shift, he theorized, is having an impact on a whole generation who are increasingly curious about what organized religion can offer.

In the end, Wooten said, “it comes down to the individual felt need of a person who has tried whatever they’ve tried — relationships or drugs, alcohol, or getting into political power or finding the right kind of job or whatever — and they realize that none of that feeds a deep need within their life. And that’s where I think faith ultimately matters.”

Apparently, more and more Utahns agree.