Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC, is a 17,000-member multisite campus with 20 locations led by pastor Steven Furtick. Along with being a popular speaker, author, and Grammy-winning musician, Furtick is known for having the term “narcegesis” (narcissistic exegesis) named after him, wearing expensive luxury clothing, and having a generally poor grasp of theology. (see endnotes)

We recently wrote about him after he was accused of using geofencing technology to intentionally target smaller churches with location-based ads. This ensured that as soon as congregants stepped foot onto their own church property, they were pushed advertisements intended to draw them away.

Elevation recently released its 2024 annual report and some of the numbers are telling, reflecting an incongruity and unique challenges about the nature of megachurches. (To see their 2023 report, click here)

While numbers vary online regarding how many people attend Elevation Church, they monitor attendance very carefully, reportedly using the same technology that big box office stores use.

Despite having a weekly attendance of 17,373, Elevation Church claims an outsized number of ‘decisions for Jesus’, including 66,109 in the last three years.

Yet almost none of those people have made Elevation Church a permanent home. Even if some of these ‘decisions for Jesus’ came during online events and cannot be plugged into their local elevation church, where did the rest go?

Here are their numbers of new converts over the last three years, including identical numbers for the past two years.

2022: 23,251.
2023: 21,429
2024: 21,429

In the same vein, Elevation Church baptized 4,308 people in 2024, which is their highest recorded number. In 2023, they baptized 4003 and 3188 in 2022. Elevation keeps a running count of all the people they’ve baptized over the years, and so far, they’ve dunked 34,968 under the water in the last two decades.

Speaking of baptisms, In 2014, Elevation Church came under fire when a document titled “Spontaneous Baptisms – A How-To Guide” was discovered on Furtick’s book’s website, which detailed the ins and outs of the big day. To build a sense of urgency and momentum, staffers were involved in inducing and manipulating people to want to get up and join the baptismal line, with the guide instructing:

The idea is that it will cause others who never planned on getting baptized that day to join them. We wonder if these sort of sketchy tactics are still being practiced.

But to the point, they’ve baptized more than 11,499 people in the last three years, and so where did they all go?

The Demographics

Elevation Church had 7,801 volunteers serving in ministries and 19,016 people in eGroups (including online), with over 2111 online leaders and facilitators. These groups range from singles, high school boys, senior citizens, young and married, etc.

As a subset, in which churches frequently make children and youth a big focus to rope in the parents, there are 3729 teenagers in these groups and 406 youth leaders, where they recorded 619 salvations and 221 baptisms.

In a similar vein, eKidz is Elevation Church’s children’s ministry for children six weeks through 5th grade. In 2024, they reported 357 salvations and 449 baptisms within this subset.

Expansion

In 2023, the church added three new franchises: permanent campuses in Belmont, NC, and Orlando, Florida, and a second campus in Toronto, Ontario. In 2024, they opened their new permanent location in Elevation Columbia and began construction on three new campuses for Elevation Raleigh, Elevation Greenville, and Elevation Uptown.

While they’re not growing numerically through in-person attendance, they are in the media. Elevation church sermons were streamed 107,062,811 times (not cumulative) across all platforms in 2024, with the most popular one being “Not Now” Is Not “No” which had 1,267,289 streams in 2024 on Youtube.

They had 458,524 Sunday live online views, 759,308 weekly sermon views, 264,256 podcast weekly streams (down from 549,514 in 2023), and 1,022,085 weekly TV viewers. Their social media platforms likewise number in the millions:

Elevation also took their church on the road, hosting a dozen “pop-up” services attended by 17,606 people, which resulted in 1,466 baptisms.

The Music

Apart from Steven Furtick as the visible face of Elevation Church, they are perhaps best known for their music, where songs they wrote dominate the charts and have become a mainstay in most churches.

In our report detailing how a mere four megachurches were responsible for producing and releasing nearly 100% of all the top worship songs released in the last decade, Elevation Church had five songs in the top 25.

In fact, their songs streamed over 2.3 billion times across all platforms in 2024, up 200 million from the year before, and those are only from official sources/channels.

They hosted their traveling worship tour, Elevation Nights, in 16 cities and had a total attendance of 161,243, with tickets in some places being sold for thousands of dollars, both last year and this year.

They also received a Dove Award for Worship Recorded Song of the Year for “Praise,” Billboard awards for Christian Artist of the Year, Christian Song of the Year, and Christian Album of the Year. They were nominated for Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album for When Wind Meets Fire and Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance for “Praise,” neither of which they won.

Serving

Elevation Church spent $12.16M on outreach efforts in 2024, bringing the total amount they’ve given since their inception to $118M. This completed 3153 events utilizing 46,317 volunteers who served 84,664 hours, about a 10% drop from last year.

Having their hands in a little bit of everything, some outreach efforts involve serving at soup kitchens, sorting groceries at food banks, volunteering to help at the local elementary school, grabbing bags and gloves, and cleaning up dirty streets.

One notable example of expanded outreach includes their Prison Ministry, where people can serve and where their content reaches 1,614 prison facilities. The notice for the opportunity reads:

Money

Elevation Church brought in $91.35M in tithes and offerings. They also received another $10M in year-end offerings, which is where Furtick pulls on the heartstrings in November and December to firm up the books, resulting in a total of $101.35M, or down nearly $7M from the year before.

Of this, 35% was spent on personnel ($31.8M), $10.9M on operating outreach programs, $6.29M on facilities, $16.89M on expansion capital and savings, and $25.29M on central operations and ministries.

While we don’t have access to their Form 990, in 2023, the church reported having $305M in assets, or nearly a third of a billion dollars.

The church doesn’t publicly share how much compensation Furtick himself receives, which is reportedly set by external groups and is not even known by church members, but given that he lives in a 16,000sq home that he purchased for $1.7 million (now reportedly valued at $3.9) it’s safe to say it’s a tidy sum.

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For more on Furtick, here are some of his best/ worst hits:

Never Forget: The Steven Furtick Coloring Book+ All the Pages We Have Uncovered
Uncovered! 2013 ‘Boot Camp Book’ from Steven Furtick’s Elevation Church. Feat. ‘THE CODE’
Steven Furtick Engages in Rank Heresy: ‘What God is; You Are’
Would you Pay $2480.30 For Tickets to a Steven Furtick/ Elevation Worship Concert?
Steven Furtick’s Son’s New Rap Song Ft. Guns, Sex and Designer Clothes+ Mother Endorses
Steven Furtick Says God Doesn’t Make You into a New Creation
$1090 Sweater? $1990 Handbag? $2720 Coat? Round-Up of Preachers N Sneakers
Steven Furtick Goes on a Wild, Wild, Willllldd Rant about Betas and Blessings
‘Twerking for the Lord?’ Steven Furtick Laughs as TD Jakes Disgraces his Wife
Steven Furtick Screams ‘I Am God Almighty!’ In Wild Sermon
Steven Furtick Promotes Trinity Denier’s Book + Says His Kids Think his Words are Scripture
TNB drops Millionaire Heretic Kenneth Copeland after 40 years, Picks up Millionaire Heretic Steven Furtick

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