Decades after he first stepped into a small Atlanta television studio, the reach of Dr. Charles Stanley's "In Touch" broadcast ministry remains one of the largest in American religious media. The figures vary depending on the source and the specific medium counted — television, radio, or satellite — but even the most conservative estimates place his weekly audience among the widest of any preacher in modern history.
According to In Touch Ministries' own station finder, the program is currently distributed to more than 700 local television stations and over 600 local radio stations across the United States. This is the figure the ministry uses to describe its present-day, station-by-station domestic distribution, and it's the number that would matter most to a listener trying to find "In Touch" on their local dial or cable lineup.
Beyond the raw station count, In Touch Ministries states on its official biography page that the program reaches almost every major market in the United States, with a domestic household reach exceeding 115 million homes. That household figure reflects potential audience access through cable, satellite, and broadcast carriage deals rather than a simple market tally — but it underscores just how deeply the program has penetrated the American media landscape since it first left Atlanta's WXIA-TV in the early 1970s.
When international television, radio, and satellite networks are added to the domestic numbers, the ministry's own materials cite a considerably larger figure. Both the In Touch biography page and the official Charles Stanley biography site put the worldwide distribution at more than 4,000 television, radio, and satellite networks and stations combined. That same material notes Dr. Stanley's sermons have been translated into 127 languages, extending the program's reach well beyond English-speaking audiences.
Other ministry-affiliated sources offer a middle estimate. Daystar's profile of the broadcast describes "In Touch" as airing on more than 2,800 stations worldwide, combining radio and television distribution alongside internet streaming through intouch.org and the In Touch Messenger app. The discrepancy between the 2,800 and 4,000-plus figures likely comes down to whether satellite and cable network carriage is counted separately from individual terrestrial stations, and whether the count was taken at different points in the ministry's history.
Anyone comparing these figures should understand they are answering slightly different questions:
~700 TV / ~600 radio stations — the current, real-time domestic station count as tracked by the ministry's own station locator tool.
~2,800 stations worldwide — a combined global radio-and-television figure cited by affiliated broadcast partners.
4,000+ networks and stations worldwide — the ministry's headline figure, which appears to fold in satellite carriage, cable networks, and international syndication partners alongside individual stations.
115 million U.S. households — a measure of potential domestic audience reach through cable and satellite carriage, not a station or market count.
The scale of the modern "In Touch" broadcast traces back to 1972, when Stanley — then a year into his tenure as senior pastor of First Baptist Church Atlanta — launched a half-hour local program called "The Chapel Hour" on Atlanta's WXIA-TV and WANX. Within six years, the fledgling broadcast caught the attention of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which in 1978 folded it into a new national satellite distribution system. What had been a program watched by roughly 16,000 local viewers reportedly reached a nationwide cable audience within a week of that switch, according to the ministry's own historical account.
Radio syndication followed in 1982 with the formal incorporation of In Touch Ministries, and the broadcast's footprint has expanded steadily ever since — through cable, satellite, terrestrial radio, and eventually internet streaming and mobile apps.
Stanley's broadcast work earned him induction into the National Religious Broadcasters' Hall of Fame in 1988. He also served two terms as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, from 1984 to 1986, a period that coincided with the rapid national expansion of the "In Touch" broadcast.
Current carriage includes national Christian television networks such as the Inspiration Network (INSP), Trinity Broadcasting Network, and CornerStone Television Network, which lists the program in regular weekend and early-weekday slots. Listeners and viewers can locate a specific local station or airtime through the ministry's zip-code-based station finder tool.
There is no single official "number of stations" for the Charles Stanley broadcast — the correct figure depends on whether one is counting current domestic stations (roughly 1,300 combined TV and radio), global affiliate and network carriage (2,800 to 4,000-plus), or household reach (115 million in the U.S. alone). What is not in dispute is that "In Touch with Dr. Charles Stanley" remains one of the most widely distributed religious broadcasts in the world, more than five decades after it began as a local half-hour program in Atlanta.
Sources: In Touch Ministries, CharlesStanley.com, Daystar, CornerStone Television Network.