Inside of every salary report, ChurchSalary includes four averages under a setting category: metropolitan city, suburb of a larger city, rural area, and small town.

One of these settings applies to your church and it can impact compensation (and giving), but how?

To keep things interesting: many of the churches or locations cited in this article are featured in movies or TV shows. Can you spot these Easter eggs?

Why not use an objective measure?

The best way to categorize your community is through self-diagnosis. You would think that the United States government would have a single objective standard which automatically categorizes each community, but they don’t. They have several definitions that are flexible and each of them produces a different set of results.

To make matters worse, Pew Research conducted a study of these definitions in 2019 and concluded that asking people to self-classify their community is just as accurate as any of these objective methods.

How should you self-classify your community?

ChurchSalary organizes communities into:

Large city (or Metropolitan city)
Suburban (or Suburb of a larger city)
Small town
Rural area

The best visual representation we can come up with are these four images.

132711 Categorize Church Community Setting.webp

Suburban (or suburb of a larger city)

Suburbs are connected to larger metropolitan areas where people work. They are closely associated with housing subdivisions connected by multi-lane roads lined with businesses and restaurants. They feature local sports complexes, golf courses, big box stores, as well as movie theaters and malls with big parking lots.

Places like East Point, Georgia or Winnetka, Illinois are perfect examples of suburban communities.

Small Town

Small towns can be tricky to differentiate from suburbs because in the last four to five decades a lot of small towns have been swallowed up by the urban sprawl from ever-expanding cities like Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta.

If you live in a small town you might have a historic city hall or courthouse like Granbury, Texas pictured above. These historic buildings are situated in a main downtown square surrounded by a small grid of city streets with pretty historic houses. If you zoom out of these small towns on a map, they look like a small grey urban or suburban core surrounded by green countryside. Several other examples of small towns include:

Woodstock, Illinois
Mount Airy, North Carolina
Dyersville, Iowa
Jackson, Georgia
Nachitoches, Louisiana
Waxahachie, Texas

Rural Area

Rural areas feature fields, farm houses, dirt roads named after the one family that lives there, cute small historic churches on the corner of two-lane road intersections, tractors, and livestock.

Some “small towns” may actually classify as a “rural area” if the community consists of a single traffic light or stop sign, a few empty downtown shops, or are an unincorporated city. In terms of population this can be the difference between several hundred and several thousand people—(e.g., 300 versus 5,000 people). What makes this challenging is that legitimate very small towns, such as Senoia, Georgia, are surrounded by rural areas and it takes less than five minutes to leave “town.” In these cases, the location of your church makes a big difference: are you “in town” like Washington Presbyterian Church or out in the countryside like Smyrna Church (both of which are located in Washington, Georgia)?

Below are a few prime examples of “small towns” that actually fall into the “rural area” category.

Large City/Urban/Metropolitan City

In the past ChurchSalary used the term “Metropolitan City,” but this caused a lot of confusion. What makes a city metropolitan?

These days we use the term “large city.” Another synonym would be an “urban area,” but this term can carry a lot of baggage.

Large cities are marked by public transportation, museums, big stadiums, large populations, high population densities, and multistory buildings where people work and live.

It can be challenging to determine whether your church falls into the Large City or Suburban category. Some ways to parse whether your community classifies as urban or a large city (versus suburban) include:

Is the population density for your community above 2,000 people per square mile?
Are you located more than 12 miles from the city center?
Do the houses in your neighborhood have driveways or on-street parking?
Could you reach the downtown area of your city or on foot in less than 30-45 minutes (by taking a train, bus, subway or some combination of public transportation)?

For example, Grace Episcopal Church in Oak Park, Illinois would be classified as a large city versus a more suburban church such as Trinity United Methodist Church in Wilmette, Illinois. While both churches are located in the greater Chicago metropolitan area, Grace Episcopal can be reached via an elevated subway by someone in downtown Chicago in less than 30 minutes. On the other hand, to reach Trinity UMC a worshipper in downtown Chicago would need to ride a Metra commuter train for almost 45 minutes. In a place like Chicago, the division between neighborhoods you can reach via a Metra commuter train versus an elevated subway car is significant. While both communities are located inside of Cook County, the suburb of Wilmette is 14 miles north of the city center.