A shared evidence base for Christian media in Europe.

Christian Media Report is a research initiative on Christian media, culture and audiences in Europe.

It exists because the sector it studies has been running largely on anecdote. Broadcasters, publishers, charities and speakers across Europe make decisions about where to put money and attention without a shared evidence base. Individual organisations hold their own subscriber data. Almost none of it is comparable, and almost none of it is published.

Our purpose is to produce that shared base, publish it openly, and repeat it every year so the numbers become a trend rather than a snapshot.

What we publish

The annual report is the main output. Edition 1 covers the Netherlands and Belgium and is built on the European Christian Media Survey, fielded in July 2026 among 4,071 respondents. Later editions will add further markets.

Insights are short standalone pieces, each taking one finding from the survey and setting out what it means in practice.

Radar tracks current developments in faith media and technology across Europe, in the same neutral register, on the site and as a weekly email briefing that gathers the week in one place.

Opinion is signed argument. It is clearly marked as such and it is the only place on this site where a position is taken.

Who pays for it

Christian Media Report was founded by New Faith Network, which funds it and fields the survey through its audience. That relationship is stated on every report and every page where a figure appears.

Editorially the two are separated. No commercial offer from New Faith Network appears in the research, and the findings are published whether or not they suit the company that pays for them. Edition 1 contains several that do not.

The honest limitation this creates is set out in full on the methodology page: the survey reaches an engaged Christian audience through one platform’s list, and it is not a representative sample of any national population. We describe what that audience says. We do not claim it speaks for everyone.

How we handle numbers

Every figure is published with the question it came from and the number of people who answered it. Where a subgroup is too small to report, we say so rather than publishing a precise-looking percentage built on thirty people.

Where a finding can be set beside published research on the general population, we do that in a fixed form we call the Delta: the outside finding, its publisher, its year and its sample, next to ours. Where the questions differ too much for the comparison to hold, the Delta says so instead of quietly omitting it.

We do not conclude on the reader’s behalf. The analysis says what the data supports and stops there.

Why we started

A note from the founder

A few years ago a former chief executive of Pure Flix sat in our office in the Netherlands. At some point in the conversation he said a line I have not been able to shake since: in God we trust, all others bring data. It is usually credited to the American statistician Edwards Deming, and it lands the way it does because it puts two worlds against each other that rarely meet.

He was right, and it was uncomfortable.

Everybody in this sector has an opinion. About where the audience has gone. About what young people do or do not want. About whether television is finished, whether podcasts are a fad, whether people still give the way they used to. The opinions are held firmly and stated confidently, and almost none of them rest on anything you could check.

Meanwhile everything moved. Media changed. Consumption changed. Trust changed, and not gradually.

So how does it actually work? Where are people now. What are they wrestling with. What do they want more of, and what can they not find.

These were our own questions before they were anyone else’s. We were making decisions about content, about languages, about which platforms to build for, and we were making them on instinct and a handful of numbers from our own dashboard. That is a thin basis for a business, and a thinner one for advice to anyone else.

At some point the obvious occurred to us. We have a direct line to this audience across Europe. We could simply ask.

That is what this is. Not a marketing exercise dressed as research, but the answer to a question we could not answer ourselves.

And having asked it, keeping the answers would be a strange thing to do. An organisation that understands its audience reaches it better. A charity that knows how its supporters give, gives them a better way to do it. A speaker who knows which questions are going unanswered has something worth saying. None of that is diminished by being shared. It is the opposite.

So we publish everything, including the findings that do not suit us. There are several in this first edition.

Iemke Roos
Founder, Christian Media Report

Taking part

Broadcasters, publishers and organisations in other European markets can field the survey to their own audience and receive their market’s results. That is how this becomes European rather than Dutch. If that is of interest, request an Insight Session.

Corrections, questions and challenges to anything published here are welcome and are handled openly. If a figure on this site is wrong, we would rather hear it from you than not at all.