Weekly survey project closure
The 2026 weekly survey project is closing.
We are deeply sorry to announce that the 2026 Christian Thought Survey weekly survey project is closing. The email platform we used experienced a bug that caused some participants to receive multiple emails, effectively spamming them. That was never intended, and we deeply apologize for the inconvenience, frustration, and loss of trust this caused.
The response from participants made clear that continuing would not be responsible. We are disappointed that we cannot carry the weekly survey project forward, and we are grateful to everyone who participated, suggested items, read the reports, or otherwise helped up to this point.
Existing public reports and archives from the weekly survey project will remain available, but no further weekly surveys, invitations, reminders, participant requests, or newsletter requests are planned.
The original CTS participant pool was assembled roughly three years before the 2026 weekly survey project. Participants were selected because they appeared to have meaningful involvement in Christian ministry, and because the project aimed to hear from a range of denominational and regional contexts rather than from one narrow church network.
The pool is also valuable because these participants did more than provide an email address. In the original project, they supplied background information such as ministry role, years in ministry, denominational setting, region, and other profile details, and they participated in an extensive survey of roughly 200 items across a large swath of doctrinal, practical, and sociological issues facing the church today.
The revived weekly survey project began by reaching out first to those earlier participants who were willing to be contacted by email. The participant-quality claims on this page apply most directly to the initial invited participants from that earlier pool. The weekly survey project is now closed, so no further panel growth or participant recruitment is planned.
That means the early weekly results should be read as the views of an intentionally ministry-focused panel, not as an official denominational poll or a statistically random survey of American ministers.
What participant quality means here
Clear ministry involvement
The pool was built around people whose public roles or stated work indicated real participation in Christian ministry, pastoral leadership, teaching, or related church service.
Serious survey engagement
The earlier long-form survey required patience and careful thought. Participants answered roughly 200 items across theological, practical, and sociological issues, giving CTS unusually rich context for interpreting later weekly responses.
Denominational breadth
CTS intentionally sought a range of Christian traditions so that reports would not merely reflect one denomination, school, or ministry subculture.
Regional breadth
The focus was primarily the United States, with attention to hearing from ministers in different regions rather than treating one local context as the whole picture.
How to read the results
Because the participant pool is ministry-focused and intentionally assembled, CTS results are especially useful for seeing how thoughtful ministers and ministry-adjacent Christian leaders reason about current issues. The results are less useful for estimating exactly what all Christians, all pastors, or all members of a denomination believe.
The earlier profile data also makes future analysis more useful. When privacy thresholds allow, weekly responses can be compared with prior information such as years in ministry, denominational family, region, and earlier patterns of belief across the original 200-item survey.
Important limitation: Participant quality does not remove sampling limits. Existing weekly reports should still be read with their posted response counts, preliminary/final status, and privacy thresholds in view.
What the panel showed
The weekly format was intended to let participants suggest clearer survey items, flag issues the administrator may have missed, and identify questions that matter to active ministry. We are grateful for the participants who helped test that possibility before the project had to close.
The goal is not to claim that CTS participants speak for the whole church. The goal is more modest and, hopefully, more useful: to provide a disciplined window into how a diverse set of ministry-involved Christians think through doctrine, practice, and contemporary church life.