$100 million to close the gap: Fixing what’s broken in the Armenian Church
For years, the decline was considered inevitable. Church attendance dropped, generations drifted away and parish activities dwindled. But Khachkar Studios sees the current state of the Armenian Church in the U.S. not as an irreversible decline, but as a system failure that can be fixed—and they’re backing that belief with a historic $100 million investment.
This bold initiative aims to rebuild what Khachkar calls the “U.S. Armenian Christian Ecosystem.” It’s based on 69 years of historical data analysis. Through that lens, the team diagnosed the church’s operational health across “12 body parts”— philanthropic support, religious content across the spectrum of media, regular Sunday Badarak attendance, Sunday school students, bible studies and church leadership managing with benchmarking and best practices.
One of the most troubling figures is that only 3% of Armenian Americans attend Badarak regularly outside of holidays, placing the Armenian Church in the bottom decile when compared to 23 U.S. Orthodox Christian groups. The results were eye-opening: 11 of the 12 body parts were rated as barriers to change.
Rather than distribute charity with no structure, Khachkar is launching a results-driven, five-year transformation program. Pilot churches and ministries will receive between $300,000 and $400,000 each to implement a custom reform strategy. But the funding comes with strings—and structure. Churches must select from an eight-activity “pilot menu,” which includes launching Bible literacy campaigns, training lay ministers, expanding high value-add role model outreach or building high-performance digital platforms.
To ensure results, Khachkar is deploying 5,000 hours of senior management support, offering professional-level guidance on implementation, accountability and performance tracking. This is not a donation—it’s a full-scale intervention.
The studio has also set clear benchmarks for success. The goal is to double the number of “faithful” Armenian American churchgoers from 12,894 to 27,847, and increase daily Bible readers from just 1,000 to 41,423. These aren’t hopes—they’re measurable targets that churches will be expected to hit, with Khachkar projecting a 6.1x social return on investment (SROI) across all pilot activities.
A significant portion of the $100 million will go toward media and messaging—areas where the Armenian Church has long been behind. The “good news” initiative will create content at 25 times the scale of all existing Armenian Christian organizations combined, ensuring that faith is once again visible where people spend their time: online.
Khachkar Studios has seven “Good News” work streams: short clips, podcasts, analyses, written content, events, news and music.
This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about systems, metrics and change. With $100 million committed, the message is clear: decline is not destiny, but apathy might be.
I used to love going to the church with my family as a kid. I fell out of love due to two specific events that happened.
One was as a small child, due to being pushed off the stairs of the church by a lady in all black complaining that we were all tourists when we were there to celebrate Easter. The love you give or don’t give a child always gets returned the same way when they grow older.
And the second was the low class behavior of the priests. Church isn’t a business and when you start talking to people disrespectfully and pushing them out because they aren’t paying as much money as the next group did, it takes away from the shine of the church.
I’ve had nowhere to go to enjoy my experience with God and as a result have lost my connection to the church and the community. I would assume I am not the only one that stopped going to church because they didn’t feel accepted by the priests and the daily church goers. Maybe work on creating a more inviting environment.