Church Membership And Affinity In The PC(USA)


In the spirit of my tag line – “I never met a data set I didn’t like” – I was thinking about how to drill down a bit further into the statistical results related to the size of churches being dismissed from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

In an ideal world there would either be statistical information about the theological leanings of every church in the PC(USA) or I could go to all their web sites and figure that out. Well, I don’t have the time to visit 10,000-plus web sites (and not every church has one) to divine their theological positions and I am not aware of a publicly available statistical study of all the PC(USA) churches. So I had to find something else.

What I will analyze as a related data set is the membership list of the Fellowship of Presbyterians that is posted on their web site. For the record, since this is a bit of a dynamic list, the version I will be using was copied on October 14, 2013.

The list has their member churches in two categories, those that are Fellowship members and those that are members of the related body, ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. It also lists individuals who are members and on this pass that was not used but I will probably come back to that in a later post. For each of the churches in the list I searched a couple of sources for their 2012 membership. The primary source was the church directory for the PC(USA). For churches dismissed to ECO this source usually did not have the membership numbers so I turned instead to the presbytery statistics.

Problems arose for those dismissed before the 2012 numbers were recorded. In some cases I had their 2011 membership numbers. In other cases I had to use the 2007 number listed in the presbytery statistics. Out of 72 ECO congregations that are counted there were 16 that I used the 2007 number and 7 that I had the 2011 membership number. In addition, three congregations are fellowships with no data, one had no reported data and two are churches that divided with one group going to ECO and a continuing congregation in the PC(USA). None of these were counted. All of this and notes about naming differences are documented with the summary statistics in the comments on the spreadsheet.

So what are the summary statistics? Well, for all 256 churches counted the mean membership is 568.0 and the median is 301.5. For the subset of churches in ECO it is a mean of 417.9 members and a median of 170 for those 72 churches. For the 184 churches in the Fellowship only, the mean is 626.7 and the median is 343 members. We should consider the ECO numbers qualitative, or at best an upper limit, because of the heterogeneous nature of the data set, but even considering that the numbers are high.

For comparison, the numbers for all of the PC(USA) are a mean of 180 and a median of 89 members for 10,262 congregations. If you want to roll the statistics back, in 2007 the mean was 204 and the median was 103, still well below the statistics for the mixed data set.

Now, it would be nice to extrapolate these numbers to all of the churches that might be considered theologically conservative since, for example, the three churches in my presbytery that have requested dismissal to ECO, while statistically larger than the average PC(USA) congregation, are not now members of the Fellowship. While tempting, that does have its statistical pitfalls. What we can say is that these sub-groups which have self-identified together around particular tenets of conservative theology are statically larger, and apparently significantly larger, than average PC(USA) congregations and so there is at least the suggestion that this could hold true for conservative churches in the denomination as a whole.  We will come back to this after a bit more explanation.

I wanted to drill down into this idea a bit more so I found a couple of other data sets to test this against. The first is the membership of the More Light Presbyterians and the second is the membership of the Covenant Network. Here More Light chapters were removed from the data set as were fellowships and NCD’s. For a church that appears on both lists and was recently dismissed from the PC(USA) the 2007 membership numbers were used and the same for a church which did not report a number in 2012. There were seven churches who reported no data at all, one more I could not find but found what appears to be the continuing congregation in the same town, and one church that I could find no trace of it having existed outside this list. The two organizations are separate entities so in addition to their individual statistics I calculated the stats for the intersection of the data sets (i.e. those that are in both) as well as the union of the sets (i.e. for every church on both lists I had numbers for). The lists were copied from the internet on October 16, 2013. As with the other data set the numbers, comments and summary statistics are available on my spreadsheet

So, the 179 More Light churches have a mean membership of 213.7 and a median of 116. Close to, but still above the stats for the denomination as a whole. The Covenant Network churches have significantly higher numbers for their 359 churches – a mean of 322.6 and a median membership of 190. The group of 102 churches that are in both organizations has a mean membership of 217.1 and a median of 138. For all 436 churches the mean is 302.6 and the median is 172 members.

So it appears that having a leaning towards liberal theology is also good for membership. In fact the ECO data set and the MLP/Covenant combined data sets have similar numbers with ECO having a median of 170 and the MLP+Covenant having a median of 172.

Now, how well is the PC(USA) represented? These are groups that we have been and are hearing about all the time in the PC(USA). However, there are 256 congregations on the Fellowship list representing about 2.5% of the total congregations in the PC(USA). (Counting only the Fellowship exclusive congregations it is 184 or 1.8% of the congregations.) Similarly, on the combined MLP and Covenant Network list it is 436 congregations or 4.2%. As for membership the Fellowship list would represent 7.9% of the PC(USA) membership and the MLP+Covenant list is 7.1% of the total PC(USA) membership. In other words, this analysis covers 15% of the membership of the PC(USA) leaving 85% not represented. And if the congregations in these data sets are statistically larger it means the the remainder are on average smaller.

So far I have only discussed the summary statistics. To take this one step further let’s look at the distribution of congregation sizes using the binning that Research Services uses in its annual report.

PC(USA) ECO Fellowship MLP  Covenant
Number of
Members
Number % Number % Number % Number % Number %
1-50 3112 30.4 7 9.7 3 1.6 31 17.3 38 10.6
51-100 2394 23.4 15 20.8 17 9.2 50 27.9 68 18.9
101-150 1384 13.5 11 15.3 22 12.0 21 11.7 42 11.7
151-200 876 8.6 6 8.3 16 8.7 18 10.1 35 9.8
201-300 922 9.0 6 8.3 25 13.6 24 13.4 54 15.0
301-500 811 7.9 9 12.5 40 21.7 19 10.6 65 18.1
501-800 400 3.9 11 15.3 21 11.4 10 5.6 33 9.2
801-1200 186 1.8 4 5.6 20 10.9 4 2.2 12 3.3
1201-1600 71 0.7 0 0.0 7 3.8 1 0.6 5 1.4
>1600 78 0.8 3 4.2 13 7.1 1 0.6 7 2.0

And in graphical form (you can right click and view image for a better view).

It can be seen that for the PC(USA) as a whole the peak of the distribution is in the range for the smallest congregations. Interestingly, the four data sets considered here have, to varying degrees, a double peaked distribution. The most even of these peaks can be seen in the Covenant Network distribution with one peak in the 51-100 range and the second in the 301-500 range. For the More Light Presbyterians and ECO the lower peak in the 51-100 range is higher while for the Fellowship of Presbyterians the peak in the 301-500 range is higher. (I would note that I suspect that the double peak effect is artificially enhanced by the choice of ranges for the bins and that is something I might investigate more in the future.)

Remembering that correlation does not imply causation, there are three approaches to interpreting these results that shows there is something about having an association with  these affinity groups with theological leanings that is
good for church membership.

The first possibility is that churches with these declared affinity associations and therefore explicit theological leanings tend to attract people and so have larger memberships.

The second possibility is that when churches have larger memberships it provides something – possibility the resources of members’ time, talents, gifts and service – to be able to expand their ministry beyond just Word and Sacrament in that location so as to join and participate with various affinity groups.

The third possibility is to consider neither of these factors as the specific cause but to think of both of these as components of a larger picture. What I personally suspect is going on is that each of
these is simply one facet of a dynamic and defined church ministry with many different aspects that also probably includes living into a
mission statement (explicit or implicit), outreach and some form of
activism reflecting the church’s theological leaning and chosen affinity with a group.

In other words, these churches have higher membership because they are visible and
active and the affinity group membership is just one part of that
activity. So it is the sum total of this activity would tend to attract members to that church.

Based on my experience and observations I personally think the best interpretation is the third one, but there is nothing I see in the data itself to distinguish here. And yes, I am looking at a general trend in all of these churches and circumstances and therefore explanation will vary from one specific church to the next.

One tie-in here is the study from two years ago done by the PC(USA) Research Services called Fastest Growing Presbyterian Churches. My data above does not come anywhere close to testing all of the components listed in that report, but there are a couple of interesting points of correspondence. The first is with size and the report found, based on worship attendance not membership, that the median size of fast-growing congregations is 150 as opposed to a median worship size of 78 for the PC(USA) as a whole. The study also found that theologically liberal churches have a slight tendency to be faster-growing churches but the largest difference between the fast-growing churches and the rest of the PC(USA) was in the theologically moderate range. On the theologically conservative end the fastest-growing churches were not as well represented. While not specific to my data, the study does support the third interpretation above showing that the fastest-growing churches have more programs both within the church and for the community. (And yes, in this discussion there is an implicit association of “fastest-growing” with church size.)

One thing that should be noted, and may be reflected in the study of fastest-growing churches, is another study that showed that churches dismissed to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church actually had steeper membership declines than the average for the PC(USA). This study is by the Rev. Mike Cole titled “The Statistical Grass Is Not Greener on the Other Side“. In my own data gathering for this piece in looking at the presbytery reports I qualitatively noticed that before dismissal many of the churches that went to ECO had above average membership declines. It will be interesting to see longer-term if dismissal is better or worse for membership numbers.

Well that is enough geekiness for right now – I’ve got a bunch of other writing to get finished in the next couple of days. But there is plenty here to think about and plenty of jumping off points for future investigations as well as revisiting this list as the situation evolves. Stay tuned.

12 thoughts on “Church Membership And Affinity In The PC(USA)

  1. anonymous

    Great work! Please add in statistics for churches dismissed to EPC, it is my understanding that many churches of all sizes have been dismissed to that denomination. It is more conservative and more widespread throughout the country than ECO

    Reply
  2. Dana Allin

    That is a lot of data, thanks for collecting and posting and processing it!
    One thought on the steeper membership decline in churches that are switching to EPC and ECO is that many churches do a better job of “cleaning” their roles prior to voting. I know for my former church we had about 15% of our roles were functionally inactive and yet for a variety of reasons they had been kept on the roles. But when it came time to take our vote we knew we had to make a quorum and so it was imperative to clean our roles. We did so according to the parameters of the Book of Order, but we became much more serious about this annual task. Our giving increased 12% over the course of 2 years our membership gain was 10% but our loss was 20% (I would estimate 15% was from cleaning the rolls over the 2 years) I do know many other churches are doing the same thing.

    The other thing that we saw was that sometimes evangelical members would leave or ask that there names be removed for conscience reasons. Some found new churches others asked to be reinstated once we transitioned to ECO. The estimation was that if we didn’t make the transition 25-35% of very active members were going to leave.

    I will certain grant that it is very hard to attract new members while a church is going through discernment. And that part of the reason for the creation of the Fellowship was that membership decline was an across the board problem and that people wanted to rally around adaptive, missional changes and not winning votes.

    I do have one good anecdotal story of an ECO church. They e-mailed me in July to say that they had more baptisms in the first 6 months of this year than any single previous year in their 125 year history. Obviously the glory goes to the Lord for this, but I do hope that by being in ECO a new scorecard and expectation was established.

    Reply
  3. Steve Salyards

    Thanks

    I have an EPC data set in the works. But as tough as ECO churches are tracking back some of their history I have found the EPC churches, because the history is generally older, to be more challenging. Working on it – hope to have it some day soon.

    Reply
  4. Steve Salyards

    Thanks.

    All good explanations for the membership drop. The other thing I have seen happen is that ahead of the move to ECO, or the vote on it those who wish to continue with the PC(USA) transfer to near by churches. A bit like your cleaning the rolls comment.

    Reply
  5. Greg Wiest

    Dear Steve,
    Your calculations do not have much meaning for me because of the basis of your numbers which is “membership”. I am a PCUSA pastor. One of the churches that I served had 150 in membership and about 120 in attendance. I knew of several churches in our presbytery that had 500 in membership and 75 in attendance. I see the same thing though out our denomination. There is also this: Conservative churches are more likely to keep roles clean as there is an aversion to sending money to the denomination. Do your numbers on an attendance basis and I will be impressed. Membership numbers do not tell the real story.

    Reply
  6. Steve Salyards

    Thanks for the thoughts and I understand your concerns.

    I have long had an argument with myself about whether membership or worship attendance, both of which are reported in the statistics, is a better way to go. While attendance has several advantages, which you correctly outline, I am sticking with membership for the moment.

    You are correct that sometimes gross disparities arise between recorded membership and truly active membership. However, membership is still an official number with a roll kept by the clerk of session and per capita paid on that number, as you point out. I have tracked some membership versus reported worship numbers for some churches I am familiar with and have found as wide of swings in reported attendance as there are recognized problems with membership. If there are multiple services so some individuals get counted twice? In large churches what method is used to accurately count attendance or is it estimated? And I know of a couple of churches with very similar membership numbers but different worship numbers because one has a significant number of shut-ins they wish to keep on the rolls.

    While no data set is perfect there is a set formula for reporting membership even if some churches are not good about cleaning the roles. On the one hand, with a large enough data set the errors should be similar and biases should work the same way in a comparison. On the other hand, if your comment about conservative churches keeping cleaner rolls is correct, one of my conclusions is further amplified.

    Having said that, I have long wanted to extend that comparison of worship and membership numbers and I will see if I can find time to do that and report on it.

    Thanks again for your skeptical eye on my data set

    Reply
  7. Chris Cole

    I suspect that the declining membership of congregations before dismissal to the EPC could be partly explained by clearing the rolls of inactive members before the vote to secede. This would prevent someone from showing up after a long period just to disrupt the congregational vote. The rise in membership among more-liberal congregations would be partly the result of members transferring from seceding congregations, in order to remain in the PCUSA.

    Reply
  8. Steve Salyards

    The clearing of roles before dismissal is a very likely explanation. In addition to helping clarify the vote I know that our gracious dismissal policy as well as others, require every member be contacted to explain the options. That would be a logical time for people to request their names be dropped from the rolls.

    Reply
  9. Steve Salyards

    Yes, lots of this going around right now. That Outlook article was a nice expansion of his original white paper I linked to.

    Reply
  10. James K

    One other consideration for the relevance of membership to vitality: geography. Having lived and served in So Cal, Jersey, the upper Midwest, and now Seattle area (and having searched for calls esp in urban NE, Midwest, and West), it seems to me that churches on the West Coast generally keep relatively ‘cleaner’ rolls (reported worship attendance on CIF much closer to membership totals for West Coast churches). The West Coast may not be the only such area, of course.
    So here is a question for stats: are MLP and CN churches more likely to be in regions where churches by culture and custom keep more people on the rolls longer? Or EPC? ECO? Or are some of these groups in areas with normally cleaner rolls?

    Reply
  11. Steve Salyards

    Interesting observation.

    My personal and very limited first-hand experience would agree – although maybe not exclusively cleaning the rolls. My church in SoCal is aggressive about cleaning the rolls but also carries fewer shut-ins on the rolls than the church I was in back in the northeast.

    I have the data to test this and will try to do that when I get the chance. (I’ve got three other analyses on that data I want to run first.)

    Thanks for the thoughts

    Reply

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