Category Archives: membership

PC(USA) Releases 2008 Membership Statistics

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Today the Office of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) released the general membership statistics for 2008.  There  is the full table of membership numbers and financial information, a table that breaks out the financial information, and a table of miscellaneous information, like the largest presbyteries and racial ethnic breakdown.

In addition there is a statement from the Stated Clerk, Gradye Parsons, another from the Director of Racial Ethnic and Women’s Ministries Rhashell Hunter, and one from the Director of Evangelism and Church Growth Eric Hoey.

I expect that we will have to wait a bit longer for the presbytery breakdowns on the Comparative Statistics site.

First the numbers:
Membership declined from 2,209,546 at the end of 2007 to 2,140,165 at the end of 2008.  That is a net decline of 69,381 members or 3.1%.  This is slightly higher than the 2.5% loss in 2007.

Gains by profession or reaffirmation of faith were 64,701.  Gains by certificate transfers were 28,691. And gains by other means were 10,136.  All of those categories showed a decrease from their 2007 numbers.

The church transferred 34,101 members from the Church Militant to the Church Triumphant (i.e. deaths), and transfered 34,340 members to other denominations that we are in communication with by certificated transfer.  An additional 104,428 were simply removed from the rolls.  And every one of these values was higher than in 2007.

The denomination had a net loss of 69 churches, or 0.64%, decreasing from 10,820 to 10,751.  And the denomination had a net loss of ministers of 82, or 0.38%, from 21,368 to 21,286.  The number of ministers per church stayed about even at 1.97 in 2007 and 1.98 in 2008.  The average number of members per church declined from 204.2 in 2007 to 199.1 in 2008.

In the financial numbers the contributions declined slightly from $2.162 billion to $2.137 billion, a decrease of $24 million or 1.1%.  However, on a per-member basis the giving rose from $978.54 to $998.94.  A ray of hope in though economic times.

The other significant improvement is highlighted by the Rev. Rhashell Hunter where she points out that racial ethnic membership has risen from 4.7% in 1998 to 7.5% in 2008.  Not the hoped for 10% but still a significant improvement.

Now, the reality check:  For those that are looking for an easy answer to the decline by saying that churches are moving to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church take a close look at the numbers.  From the Layman’s chart I count at most 10 churches and about 8,000 members that have left the PC(USA) in 2008 to find a better theological fit.  Interestingly the just-released 2008 statistics show 25 churches transferred in 2008 and 65 dissolved.  That leaves 59 churches and 130,768 members who left under other circumstances.  While theological differences may be one cause for membership decline the numbers don’t show a mass exodus to a sister denomination.  In fact in his piece Gradye Parsons correctly points out that people tend to drift away from the church.  That is where the PC(USA) must concentrate to stop the membership loss.

Now, down off soap box and on to other things.

General Assembly of the Church of Scotland — What Is Not On The Table But Waiting In The Wings

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The ordination/installation standards debate that has caught all the attention for the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland has distracted a lot of people from the other business of the Kirk.  This is too bad since there is a lot of other important business to be done at the Assembly and I hope that last night’s debate won’t take too much wind out of the rest of the Assembly meeting.

One of the things that has really impressed me about the Church of Scotland is the spirit and seriousness with which they have been addressing the changing place of the church, dare I say mainline church, in modern society.

I think that there are a number of reasons for the Kirk’s success in addressing this, not the least of which is that while the debate on various aspects of human sexuality has been on the table (such as the issue of blessing same-sex unions in 2007 and multiple reports from the Working Group on Human Sexuality) the various issues have not distracted the church the way they have in some other denominations — Presbyterian and otherwise.

But another aspect is the length of time that the church has been seriously dealing with this.  One major milestone was the “Church Without Walls” (CWW) report and group.  The original report was commissioned in 1999 and presented in 2001 and it’s purpose was

To re-examine in depth the primary purposes of the Church

and the shape of the Church of Scotland as we enter into the next
Millennium;

to formulate proposals for a process of continuing reform;

to consult on such matters with other Scottish Churches;

and to report to the General Assembly of 2001.

The recommendations of that report were:

  • Live with a Gospel for a year
  • Review community, worship and leadership
  • Integrate children and/or create new churches
  • Develop paths for the journey of discipleship
  • Plan strategically to develop leadership in congregations in worship, pastoral care and mission
  • Work in teams and partnerships
  • Recover the role of the evangelist
  • Turn the church “upside down”- priority to the local
  • Renew prayer life
  • Encourage sabbatical time from church activities
  • Fund new initiatives through special funding
  • Review overall financial strategy
  • Dare to take risks

Have a look at the summary of the 2001 report (DOC Format)  And this year there was a GA “fringe event” to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the start of the CWW which Liz at “journalling” talks about yesterday and today.

Since 2001 this work has not stopped.  While the 2009 GA voted on Thursday to fold the Church Without Walls Planning Group into the Mission and Discipleship Council the part of the charge “to formulate proposals for a process of continuing reform” has indeed been realized as have many other of the recommendations.

Monitoring of CWW, as well as changes to the Kirk structure originally fell to Assembly Council.  But when that body was restructured the next group charged by the GA to look at the future of the Kirk, and the group that was keeping an eye on the CWW Planning Group, is the Panel on Review and Reform.  It has as part of its charge:

…to listen to the voices of congregations and Presbyteries, to present a vision of what a church in need of continual renewal might become and to offer paths by which congregations, Presbyteries and agencies might travel towards that vision.

Formed in 2004 it has been holding discussion with presbyteries and congregations as part of its work.  In their 2009 Report to the Assembly they discuss the continuing discussion process and also encourage all governing bodies and entities of the Church of Scotland to include the Kirk’s vision statement on their publications.  That vision statement says:

The vision of the Church of Scotland is to be a church which seeks to inspire the people of Scotland and beyond with the Good News of Jesus Christ through enthusiastic, worshiping, witnessing, nurturing and serving communities.

However, the Church of Scotland has recognized that they have a constitutional, and traditional, impediment to reform in the Third Article of the Articles Declaratory:

lll. This Church is in historical
continuity with the Church of Scotland which was reformed
in 1560, whose liberties were ratified in 1592, and for whose
security provision was made in the Treaty of Union of 1707.
The continuity and identity of the Church of Scotland are
not prejudiced by the adoption of these Articles. As a national
Church representative of the Christian Faith of the Scottish
people it acknowledges its distinctive call and duty to bring
the ordinances of religion to the people in every parish of
Scotland through a territorial ministry. [emphasis added]

The Church of Scotland has a status that almost no other Presbyterian branch has and that is its standing as a National Church.  They are, by the Kirk’s constitution, required to be everywhere in Scotland, and as you can imagine there are costs involved in keeping small churches open.

At the 2006 General Assembly there was a request, and the assembly complied, with establishing a Special Commission on Structure and Change.  The purpose was to evaluate the changes to the central committees and offices of the church and to consider changes to the overall structure, including presbyteries.  In the report presented to the 2008 General Assembly (DOC Format) they discuss the Third Article.  Here is that section, absent the text of the Article which I included above:

13. The Third Article Declaratory

13.1 [Text of the Third Article]

13.2 The Church is accordingly constitutionally committed to providing a ministry, understood
as including a ministry of Word and
Sacrament, in every part of Scotland
without exception. It appears to us that everything that we have been called upon to
consider in the areas of structure,
finance and the allocation of resources,
flows from the imperative contained in the Third Article and, in particular, its third
sentence. It is the requirement to bring
the ordinances of religion to the people
in every parish of Scotland through a territorial ministry that determines that congregations
must be maintained, irrespective of
their ability to support themselves and
therefore that other congregations must take
on the burden of that support. It has implications for how resources are to be allocated.

13.3 We believe that the time is right for the Church to look critically at the Third Article and
decide whether it should be retained,
amended or removed altogether.

13.4 We question whether any valuable principle is dependent upon retaining the Third Article. We
would agree with the view expressed in Church Without Walls that it is a statement that needs to be
examined and questioned at the beginning
of the twenty-first century. It may be
that as a result of such an examination the Church will conclude that the time has come
humbly to lay down the title of
“National Church” and accept a new title
such as “A Church for the Nation”. It may be thought more meaningful for the Church to
“represent to” the Scottish people the
Christian faith rather than to assume
that the Church of Scotland is “representative of the Christian faith of the Scottish
people”. We are one of many Christian
denominations within our country and it
may be that an ecumenical outlook would be more effective in reaching all Scotland with
the Gospel. Major changes would not
necessarily see the Kirk lose its
Presbyterian identity. The Presbyterian Church in other countries has survived without being
“national” in its context. Our
self-identity would change in some ways but
so would the ability to earn greater respect within the nation. The example of Jesus as the humble
servant would seem to provide a helpful
model.

13.5 Whether there is a continuing role for the Third Article is helpfully discussed in a section of
Church without Walls. We have included that
section as Appendix IV to this report.
We commend it to the Church as a
starting point in its consideration of the question.

The 2008 Assembly established the special committee to look at the Third Article and how it impacts the church and it will report back to the 2010 Assembly.

This would be a major change as you can imagine and there is already discussion about what the implications are.  At the National Youth Assembly this past September the youth debated this as part of their discussion of “Future Church.”  In the National Youth Assembly Report to this General Assembly recommendation, or statement, number 10 is:

10. Believes that Territorial Ministries as outlined in Article 3 have a complex impact on the mission of the church; it could be perceived as the focal point in relation to the calling and training of ministers without appropriate attention to the possibility of using lay ministers and particular callings. At the same time territorial ministry offers a precious universality in the support of the country’s people.

And the news media has picked up on a proposal to use video technology to provide ministerial presence in churches that have vacancies, particularly those in remote areas that have difficulty attracting ministers to their charges.  The action item in the Ministries Council report says:

6. Note with concern the pressures being faced by the Church in Presbyteries facing numerous, lengthy vacancies, commend ministers, deacons, Auxiliary ministers, readers and elders who are enabling the Church in these presbyteries to evolve new patterns of life, and welcome in particular the possibilities that video technology, secondment and transition ministry offer.

Like other Presbyterian branches the Church of Scotland has difficulty getting their ministers distributed to all the churches with urban charges being preferable to small isolated churches on the islands in Orkney.

So as the Assembly continues this coming week we will see what other references are made to a church thinking out side the box and looking to the future to see what a 21st century church looks like.  But the Assembly will also be looking ahead to the 2010 Assembly and the report on the Third Article that is now waiting in the wings.

Preliminary Comments On The Faith In Flux Report

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I have begun digesting the new report just issued by The Pew Forum On Religion & Public Life titled Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.

This survey is a follow up to their U.S. Religious Landscape Survey and involved recontacting about 2800 of the participants in the first survey.

The report has already gotten a lot of coverage in the mainstream media news (e.g. Louisville Courier-Journal), op-ed (e.g. New York Times), the blogosphere (e.g. Vivificat! and Kruse Kronicle) and of course the Presbyterian Outlook.

There is a lot of interesting information in this survey and I am still chewing on it but I would suggest reading the Executive Summary if you are interested or care about church membership trends today and in the future.  I am hoping to crunch some of the numbers myself and make some more detailed comments in the future.  But the way my life has been going I decided to post a preliminary article about two particular items that particularly struck me.

(Two technical details:  1) The survey give a confidence of +0.6%.  2) My main focus will be on comparing affiliated with unaffiliated so I will frequently give a range for the data in the affiliated group without breaking out individual categories.)

1)  What keeps people in the church?
As I have been reading the report I found myself asking an alternate question “How do we keep people in the church?”  If the report focuses on what makes people change then how do we turn that around to keep people in relationship with the Covenant Community.

One of the statistics that has gotten a lot of coverage, with some justification, is that “Most people who change their religion leave their childhood faith before age 24.”  (It quantifies what many of us know from experience.) But there are a number of related findings that expand on this:

  • Those individuals who are now unaffiliated were much less likely to have attended worship weekly as a teenager than those who are still affiliated — For those that are still affiliated it is in the 60-70% range that they attended weekly, for the unaffiliated 44% of those raised Catholic attended weekly as a teenager and 29% of those raised Protestant.
  • For those raised Protestant there is a notable difference between the unaffiliated and those still affiliated on whether they attended Sunday School — 51% for the former and about 65% for the latter.  No difference seen for those raised Catholic
  • Youth group attendance was also important for Protestants with 55% of those “still in childhood faith” having attended youth group, 47% who have switched to another Protestant faith, and 36% of the unaffiliated.  Again, for those raised Catholic there was very little variation between the affiliated and unaffiliated.

My conclusion — This stuff matters.  This is why we have Sunday School and Youth Group.  This is why families need to attend the education hour as well as the worship service.  It is why the Youth Group is not just for outreach but for the church kids as well.  This is why we do college/campus ministry.  It is not to “indoctrinate” but to “strengthen.”  For those that were raised Protestant and are now unaffiliated 18% said they had a “very strong faith” as a child and 12% said they had it as a teen.  This compares with 35-41% of the affiliated who had it as a child and 32-40% who had it as a teen.

Now the terminology in the next part may annoy orthodox Reformed readers, but this is the language of the culture and how the survey reports it.

When looking at reasons for switching one of the interesting questions is what brought those who were raised unaffiliated into the church.  The survey found that of those raised unaffiliated 46% were still unaffiliated, 22% were now affiliated with Evangelical Protestant churches, 13% with Mainline Protestant churches, 9% with “other” faiths, 6% Catholic, and 4% Historically Black Protestant Churches.  I must admit that I see this as a bright spot — I was really surprised that 54% of those raised without religious affiliation found one as an adult.

What were reasons that an unaffiliated “first became part of a religious group?” The top three answers

51% Spiritual needs not being met
46% Found a religion they liked more (I’ll leave the interpretation of an unaffiliated finding a religion they liked more as an exercise for the reader.)
23% Married someone from a particular faith

What got them to join?  Top five answers

74% Enjoy the religious services and style of worship
55% Felt called by God (another surprise for me, and a pleasant one that a majority did feel God’s call.  More on that in a minute.)
29% Attracted by a particular minister or pastor  (it is not a specifically listed answer for changing affiliation because a pastor left)
29% Asked to join by a member of the religion (and this is something we all should pay attention to)
25% Married someone from the religion

Lots to chew on there.  If this is what gets the “unchurched” to come and stay how can we be more effective in our outreach.

2)  Words have meanings
OK, it is another “words have meanings” rant.  But as I was reading the Executive Summary this really started grating on my nerves.  Your mileage may vary.

I should say two things in their defense first:  If you study the survey questions there is no problem there.  The questions are as precise and well worded as you would expect from this organization.  Second, if they worded it the way I want them to do in the narrative, it would be more precise but the vocabulary would be limited and would not read nearly as well, so I know why they did it.

That being said, consider the first paragraph of the Executive Summary:

Americans change religious affiliation early and often. In total, about
half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least
once during their lives. Most people who change their religion leave
their childhood faith before age 24, and many of those who change
religion do so more than once. These are among the key findings of a
new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion
& Public Life. The survey documents the fluidity of religious
affiliation in the U.S. and describes in detail the patterns and
reasons for change.

As you can see in this paragraph, and happens throughout the narrative portion, the words “religious affiliation,” “religion,” and  “faith” are used pretty much interchangeably.  Throughout the report when they use any of these words they always seem to mean “religious affiliation.”  The question then is whether they actually investigated whether someone’s personal belief system corresponded to the church they attended.  This is like their earlier survey that found that 6% of atheists believe in a personal god.

This probably struck a nerve because of my personal faith journey.  I call myself a “life-long Presbyterian” even though I was a member of a Methodist church for a few years.  My wife was raised both Methodist and Presbyterian and when we moved to a new community we felt that God was calling us to help a Methodist church plant.  However, even though I was a member of a Methodist church my ingrained thinking in terms of Presbyterian polity frustrated the District Superintendent, I annoyed the pastor and a candidate for the ministry with my confessional theology, I was personally troubled by the lack of a regular prayer of confession, and I’m sure I entertained one of the most senior pastors in the Conference as he watched all this transpire.  And we firmly believe that God got us out of there before my Presbyterian tendencies would have lead to a major conflict with a new pastor.  I will leave it to another time to ask if I was being theologically honest or religiously faithful to have been in that situation, but the bottom line is that I considered myself a Presbyterian in a Methodist environment.

And I know that I am not the only one.  I know of multiple Presbyterians that now serve, or have served, in Methodist churches in ordained and non-ordained capacities.  We have had Methodist ministers attend my current Presbyterian church.  For a survey such as this how is that classified?

So, bringing it back to the survey, in my case my “religion” and “faith,” while evolving over the years as it is normal to do, has remained denominationally stable.  But my affiliation, like 28% of the still-affiliated Protestants in the survey, has changed twice.  (49% have changed once.)

Now I do realize that individuals are more likely to be on the other end of the theological “firmness” spectrum, particularly in the Protestant denominations.  In this post-modern age specifics of confessional beliefs and church government will matter little to many of the “people in the pews.”  After all, 85% of those switching within Protestant denominations listed “Enjoy the religious services and style of worship” as one of the reasons for joining their religion and I am willing to bet that only a very small portion of those mean that they found a church that follows the regulative principle of worship or has Exclusive Psalmody.  Individuals don’t even think of it as changing religions, only changing congregations, because the theological lines are blurring in peoples’ thinking and congregations’ exposition.

What I am expressing here may be a subtle distinction, but as I read through the questions and methodology what this survey measures is not truly a persons religious faith, but their religious affiliation, their church membership.  As has been mentioned many times before what does church membership really mean in this post-modern or post-Christian period?  That is my musing.

Don’t hold your breath, but as I worked though the Amendment 08-B voting numbers I was surprised by the “churn” in the PC(USA) membership and I am working on that and some other related numbers that I hope to correlate with this survey in a later post.  We’ll see if I can actually find time amid all the GA news to make that happen.  So until next time…

A Long View Of Membership Changes

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Much has been made over the last few months about the decline, or potential decline, of various Protestant subgroups.  The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) singled out the Mainline churches, there was the op-ed piece by Michael Spencer on “The Coming Evangelical Collapse“, and last week Newsweek had one of their famous, or is that infamous, C&E (Christmas and Easter) articles on “The End of Christian America.”  And that does not count the current debate about whether the United States is now or was a Christian nation to begin with (some say yes, others say no, and some say that it depends on the context and what you mean), a debate sparked by the President’s recent comments in Turkey.  There is also an NPR piece today about the secularization of Britain.

I’m working on some of the membership stories and will post more detailed commentaries on that at a later date.  But in the midst of all this I found an op-ed piece from the Wall Street Journal that takes the long view and is a must-read if you are interested in the church membership trends.  Check out “God Still Isn’t Dead” by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.

They point out that with the Constitutional separation of church and state, the lack of a state church forced American churches to be “market driven,” free enterprise if you will, in order to have the members to be viable.

America has long stood out among developed countries for its
religiosity. This has less to do with innate godliness than with the
free market created by the First Amendment. Pre-Revolutionary America
was not that religious, because the original Puritans were swamped by
less wholesome adventurers — in Salem, Mass., the setting for “The
Crucible,” 83% of taxpayers by 1683 confessed to no religious
identification.

America became religious after the Constitution separated church
from state, thus ensuring that religious denominations could only
survive if they got souls into pews. While state-sponsored religion
withered in Europe, American faith has been a hive of activity: from
the Methodists, who converted close to an eighth of the country in the
half century after the Revolution, to the modern megachurches.

Yes, from the founding of the nation right up to the present you need those people in the pews to put their pennies in the plate to keep the lights on.  But while I agree that American Christianity is consumer driven, we use the term “church shopping” in a positive way after all, I do think a later paragraph is a bit short-sighted:

Meanwhile, the supply seems as plentiful as ever. Religion, no less
than software or politics, is a competitive business, where
organization and entrepreneurship count. Religious America is led by a
series of highly inventive “pastorpreneurs” — men like Bill Hybels of
Willow Creek or Rick Warren of Saddleback. These are far more sober,
thoughtful characters than the schlock-and-scandal televangelists of
the 1970s, but they are not afraid to use modern business methods to
get God’s message across.

Yes, there are some who base churches on more secular business methods.  And yes, I think many of us have “issues” with churches that promote “positive thinking” or “prosperity gospel” Christianity (if that isn’t an oxymoron).  But I also believe there are many faithful Christians who are drawn to churches because what the church offers is “the true preaching of the Word, the right administration of the sacraments, and discipline uprightly ministered.”  That people are drawn to a church because it fulfills the “notes of the true church” does not mean it is lead by a “pastorpreneur,” to use their term.  A good, faithful, vital product will succeed in the marketplace.

And the authors do consider the spiritual side in the article.  Towards the beginning they say:

Has this model really run out of steam? Betting against American
religion has always proved to be a fool’s game. In 1880, Robert
Ingersoll, the leading atheist of his day, claimed that “the churches
are dying out all over the land.” In its Easter issue in 1966, Time
asked “Is God Dead?” on its cover. East Coast intellectuals have
repeatedly assumed that the European model of progress, where modernity
equals secularization, would come to the U.S. They have always been
wrong.

And towards the end they observe:

Looked at from a celestial perspective, the American model of religion,
far from retreating, is going global. Pastorpreneurs are taking their
message around the world. In Latin America, Pentecostalism has
disrupted the Catholic Church’s monopoly. Already five of the world’s
10 biggest churches are in South Korea: Yoido Full Gospel Church, which
has 800,000 members, is a rival in terms of organization for anything
Messrs. Warren and Hybels can offer. China is the latest great convert.
There are probably close to 100 million Christians in China, most of
them following a very individualistic American-style faith. Already
more people attend church each Sunday than are members of the Communist
Party. China will soon be the world’s biggest Christian country and
also possibly its biggest Muslim one.

In the long view, no theological branch is monolithic in space and time.  If I may narrow down the perspective a bit and just comment on American Presbyterianism:  Almost from its inception the American Presbyterian church has been a dynamic entity.  The first presbytery was founded in 1706 and the first division occurred in 1741.  While the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) counts its General Assemblies from the first one in 1789 so that there have now been 218 of them, really the PC(USA) came into being in a merger in 1983.  And while the PC(USA) can legitimately trace its history as the main branch of American Presbyterianism from 1706, it is important to note that the history is shared with other branches.  The Presbyterian Church in America, formed in 1973, also traces his history and polity back through the southern church, the Presbyterian Church in the United States.  One diagram of American Presbyterian history shows nine different American Presbyterian churches at the present time, and I am aware of a few more that have spread into the country rather than branching off of the historical trunk. (For example the Free Presbyterian Church of North America)

Anyway, as much as we might like to think there is, and always has been, a single branch of American Presbyterianism, in the long view that is not the case.  While American Presbyterianism as a whole can legitimately claim a solid 300 year history, the individual denominations show an ebb and flow.  There is no reason to think that should end now.

Membership Changes In American Churches — Part I

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I would think that even the casual observer would notice that over the last couple of weeks there has been an explosion of articles in the news, and a corresponding explosion of discussion in the blogosphere, about the changes in membership patterns in American churches, particularly the mainline denominations.  While I think that there are a number of reasons for this, it appears that what catalyzed the reaction was the publication of the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) by the researchers from Trinity College in Connecticut.  I have done a first read of the survey and will be studying it in detail and crunching some of their numbers over the next couple of weeks.  More details when I have had a chance to study it, but I want to make two comments related to the survey and the media response now:

1)  This survey (full report PDF) is the third in a series tracking the American religious landscape over time.  The first was in 1990, the second in 2001, and the present one in 2008.  Reading through the tables and main text, nowhere do they give error-bounds with their results.  In the Research Design section on page 2 they do say that their high number of samples (>50,000 in 2008 and 2001, and >110,000 in 1990) gives “a standard error of under 0.5 percent for the full population in 2008.”

The patterns in Table 1 showing changes in the broad categories of religious affiliation showed significant (and I mean that technically) changes in almost every category between the 1990 and 2001 survey.  (Other Religions only grows from 3.3% in 1990 to 3.9% in 2008 so that change is completely within the uncertainties.)  However, from 2001 to 2008 the changes in most categories are much smaller than in the earlier time period.  While “Other Christian” is a statistically significant decrease from 52.2 to 50.9% in seven years, no other category changes by more than 0.8% which the Research Design section leads us to believe is statistically indistinguishable. (Two numbers would need to be more than 1% different if each has an error bound of +/-0.5%)  Future publications with error bounds on each number, or more detailed error limits, may show that these changes are significant.

2)  In a CNN article on the study Mr. Mark Silk, of Trinity College and the author of Spiritual Politics, makes the following statement:

The rise in evangelical Christianity is contributing to the
rejection of religion altogether by some Americans, said Mark Silk of
Trinity College.

“In the 1990s, it really sunk in on the
American public generally that there was a long-lasting ‘religious
right’ connected to a political party, and that turned a lot of people
the other way,” he said of the link between the Republican Party and
groups such as the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family.

Now, this is an interesting statement and it may even be true.  The problem is that CNN does not provide Mr. Silk’s data or source so it is left as the expert assertion of Mr. Silk that this is the case.

(It is important to clarify that Mr. Silk is listed as being on the Research Team for the ARIS survey, but is not one of the Principal Investigators.)

Since there are three types of lies… For the sake of argument let me present some data and argue the opposite — Liberal Christianity is driving people away from the church, or at least certain denominations.

But first, I find it interesting that I can’t show that within a denomination based on presbyteries in the PC(USA).

The link between theological perspective and membership changes has been of great interest to me as I follow the voting patterns on Amendment 08-B in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)  At the present time, I have found no clear association.

Here are the data from voting to date for all 97 presbyteries that have voted and reported their numbers in 2001-2 and 2008-9.  This first graph is the change in presbytery membership as a ratio of the 2007 membership to the 2000 membership (the most recent membership numbers available from Research Services), versus the percentage of “Yes” votes on 08-B.  Using the “Yes” votes as a proxy for the degree of liberal political leanings of the presbytery, the theory is that if one theological perspective is more attractive to the general membership of the PC(USA) we should see higher membership declines for opposite leaning presbyteries.

See the correlation?  I don’t either.  In fact the correlation coefficient is -0.08, very close to zero for no correlation.  So there does not appear to be an association between the presbytery leanings on this theological issue and membership decline.

What if we were to ask if the change in membership favored one theological perspective.  Here is the data with the same membership change measure but with the change in the percentage of commissioners voting yes.  Based on one theory, if the conservatives are leaving, presbyteries with higher membership losses should see an increase in the number of yes votes.

No, I don’t see it either and the correlation of 0.04 is even worse.  In fact, these two graphs are typical of what I have been finding for the PC(USA), that on a presbytery basis there is virtually no correlation between membership changes and voting patterns.  I’ll continue with this another time.

(Technical note:  I did not include Eastern Korean Presbytery in the data above because it has a remarkable growth of 2.68X from 2000 to 2007.  It is an extreme outlier and it would have leveraged the correlation.  However, as a single point it supports the theory that the fewer yes votes the more attractive the church:  It has always been a 100% vote for “fidelity and chastity” (“No” votes) and is in a class by itself in growth.  And looking at the statistics it appears to be fairly constant growth over those seven years.)

Let me turn to another set of data, the membership numbers reported by the National Council of Churches.  A quick glance at the list shows that four member denominations had increases in membership:  Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Assemblies of God, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.).  The denominations that reported losses of more than 2% were the UCC (-6.01%), AME Zion Church (-3.01%), and the PC(USA) (-2.79%).  Looking at the list of churches, the general perception is that churches with more “liberal” leanings have greater membership losses than those identified as “conservative.”  Is this perception true?

To measure “liberal” versus “conservative” let’s turn first to the Public Religion Research‘s new report Clergy Voices: Findings from the 2008 Mainline Protestant Clergy Voices Survey.  The first problem here is that they look at Protestant churches so only seven of the NCC churches are in the study.  But it is current and it is specific to denomination.

To supplement this I turn to a study done for the Southern Baptist Convention by Ellison Research.  In this study, from 2006, there is a table of “Political Views of Clergy” but besides the SBC the other denominational categories are more general.  I will use the number for “Other Baptists” for the second largest Baptist denomination, the National Baptist Convention (NBC).  For the “Pentecostal” category I will use the largest Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God (AOG).

Finally, a 2003 article provides a final source: “The Political Attitudes and Activities of Mainline Protestant Clergy in the Election of 2000: A Study of Six Denominations,” by Smidt and others (the last of the others is Beau Weston) in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, v. 42, p. 515-552.  This survey is older but specific to denominations and adds the Reformed Church in America (RCA) to the list.  Getting the RCA membership change was not straight-forward since they are not on the NCC top 25 list, but a PC(USA) comparison reports a 12% decline in the decade ending in 2005 so I’ll use an annual change of -1.25%.

 Denomination Ann. member. change % Progressive
Clergy voices 		%Liberal
Ellison 		%Liberal
Political Attitudes 		 median %
 SBC  -0.24%    4%    4%
 UMC  -0.80%  28%  35%  38%  35%
 NBC  0%    5%    5%
 ELCA  -1.35%  27%  29%  61%  29%
 PC(USA)  -2.79%  34%  35%  46%  35%
 AOG  +0.96%    7%    7%
 Episcopal  -1.76%  43%      43%
 ABCUSA  -0.94  24%    23%  24%
 UCC  -6.01%  55%      55%
 DOC  0%  39%    61%  50% (avg)
 RCA  -1.2%      26%  26%

Just a technical note that since the Political Attitudes study was significantly higher in a couple of cases I chose to average when I had two values and use the median if there were three values.  Also, the clergy voices study had both a “Progressive” measure and a “Liberal” measure and I chose to use the Progressive because of the better agreement with the Ellison numbers.

Is there information in this noise?  There sure seems to be a correlation.  The R-squared is 0.44 which gives a correlation of -0.66. That is pretty good.  If you are worried about the high UCC number leveraging the correlation, the correlation is -0.52 without it, so it has an effect, but not an overwhelming one.  And yes, some non-linear relationship would fit the data better, but for a preliminary exploration the linear works well.  Clearly, a detailed analysis of this would want to use a greater quantity of data that is consistent in source and acquisition.  And the decline numbers are for just one year and a multi-year trend might show something completely different. But this preliminary exploration is interesting.

So there is a correlation between the political leanings of the clergy and the change in membership such that membership losses and liberal leanings increase together.  I do admit that I have not established a cause and effect here:  Does the more liberal clergy encourage the loss of membership, or is the loss of membership preferential to the conservatives leaving the liberal side behind in the Mainstream churches?  Or for that matter, are these two similarly correlated to another causal factor I am not considering.  But for some reason people seem to be leaving the more liberal churches preferentially.  The interesting thing is that if Mr. Silk is correct the rise of evangelicals did not uniformly drive members from the Mainstream churches but it was preferential to the more liberal churches.  (Note: We may be talking about two different time periods here as well, Mr. Silk in the 90’s and I in this decade.  The other major difference is that I am using reported membership numbers while he is looking at the larger population of those who self-identify with the denominations. And there are a host of other factors involved in the protocols of the surveys that might invalidate any comparison.)

Enough statistics and number crunching for today.  More to come.  But let me just say that even after my first read of this, and several of the documents that have come out recently, I don’t agree with every conclusion I read.  Your mileage may vary.

Programming note:  For the next week or so I will be intensely occupied with some meetings.  I have a couple of unrelated posts in the pipeline but more of this and other intensive analysis will be on hold for a week or more.  Sorry about that.  Thanks for understanding.

A Look At Some Details In the PC(USA) Membership Changes

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I have long had a curiosity about some of the nuances of the changes in the membership of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  I mentioned this in my analysis last June when the 2007 statistics were released and again in a discussion I had in the comments section of a recent post.

The questions is:  How much of the PC(USA) membership decline can be attributed to churches departing to other denominations versus how much is individual departures?

To attack this question I used as my basis for churches departing two complimentary lists.  The first is the one published by the Layman Online.  The second comes from the PresbyLaw site.  The Layman List is a bit more up-to-date than the PresbyLaw list.  The PresbyLaw list goes back much further, further than I wanted to check, and has the events broken out and linked in a more detailed fashion.  But in major details there are no significant details that differ between the two lists.  The information on these lists was checked against the PC(USA) Congregational Directory.  I checked a few other web sites and articles to try to refine some of the information.  And in my working with the numbers below I did not include membership changes due to deaths —  membership transfers to the Church Triumphant are an acceptable loss.  However, the “net” membership changes do have the deaths included.

First, the results for 2006 and 2007 as best as I could piece them together.  While it is tempting to reproduce my research into another table in this blog I’m not sure my time or your patience justifies it.  So what is listed are summary statistics.

2006
According to the official statistics, from 2005 to 2006 there was a net loss of 56 churches.  Within the loss in churches there were 56 dissolved and 6 dismissed.

From the Layman and PresbyLaw lists there were 7 churches that left the denomination.  While these were usually marked as “dismissed,” from looking at the individual statistics it is often not clear or consistent how the members were lost so I lump the two together throughout.

So, with 62 churches gone, of those 7 “departing” for other denominations, 11% of the church loss can be accounted for in departures of this nature.  That means that 89% are churches dissolved for other reasons.  Around my area it is declining membership.

Between 2005 and 2006 the net loss in membership was 46,542.  In the losses column there were 27,900 certificate losses, that is transfer requests to other denominations, and 102,125 “other” losses.  The total of these two is 130,025.

Based upon the seven churches listed as departing their total membership was 901, or 0.7% of the total and 1.9% of the net.

To this we can add the churches on the list which I will call “distressed.”  I did not research the circumstances of each one, but some of these show a year-after-year decline and some have a one-time decline when the church was declared in schism, a group left the church and the PC(USA) could identify a “continuing” church.  There appear to be two of these on the list for a total loss of 261 members.

So, the total loss in 2006, as best as I can reconstruct, from “denominational concern,” is 1126 members.

2007
From 2006 to 2007 the net loss of churches was 83 on the official rolls.  In the loss column there were 71 dissolved and 12 dismissed for the total of 83.

From the lists there were 16 fewer churches so in 2007 19% appear to be denominationally related.

Total denominational membership dropped by 57,572.  In the loss column 30,329 were certificate losses and 102,714 were “other” losses for a total of 133,034, or 3018 higher than in 2006.

From the 16 departing churches there are some significantly higher memberships than in 2006 with the total being 6832 or an average of 427 per church.  The average church size, according to the PC(USA) statistics, is 205 members, so these include larger than average churches, the largest being 1900.

There are also nine “split” churches in the list that have listed a loss of 965 members between transfers and other.  That brings the total losses on these lists to 7797 or 5.9% of the PC(USA) total for transfers and losses and 13.5% of the denominational net.

Discussion and Conclusions
Well, the first conclusion seems to be that the vast majority of people who leave the PC(USA) are not leaving with a particular church or splinter group but are just leaving as individual families.  Based on these lists, even a major flaw in my methodology would not increase the numbers dramatically relative to the totals.

So this seems to bring good news and bad news.  The good news is that the defections to other denominations are not a major outflow.  The bad news is that there are much larger issues to consider in the loss of membership.

One interesting finding is the relatively close correlation between the
official number of churches dismissed and the number on the lists. 
While some of the departing congregations were dissolved it is good to
know that a majority were dismissed.

Two interesting items about the PC(USA) methodology did jump out at me.  The first is that as far as the membership numbers are concerned a church and its members have not left until the PC(USA) says that it has left.  While a church may vote to leave the presbytery or civil legal process may hold up their “recognized” departure for months to years.  This means that churches appear in both the PC(USA) membership directory and the Evangelical Presbyterian Church directory simultaneously.  For example: First Presbyterian Church, Thibodaux, LA — PC(USA) and EPC.

The second is that reporting of membership statistics for churches in schism is sometimes, shall we say, questionable.  While some churches were clearly showing the sudden drop in membership from those that moved on with the departing group, in other cases the membership is being kept level, sometimes just filling in the static number with no gains or losses.  Examples:  Londonderry, NH and First PC Torrance, CA.

It would be expected that in both of these cases the statistics would get caught up at some time in the future.

One area these do not address, and I do not presently have the time to pursue, is the concentration in specific presbyteries.  There are some concentrations, such as Pittsburgh, Heartland, and Sacramento Presbyteries, so departures will have more impact on a local level.

A final observation:  In several communities where churches departed and the vote was not overwhelming I looked at the membership statistics for near-by PC(USA) churches.  In no case could I find any membership increase in a local church corresponding to the departure of the other church.  If not all the members went with the departing group they did not transfer to local PC(USA) churches.

This is not a problem with record keeping at Louisville, but a problem at the local level where the membership reports come from.  On the one hand it makes me wonder how far off some of the other numbers are.  But I am also thankful for numbers at all since the PC(USA) is one of the few Presbyterian branches there has generally reliable reporting that they make available to the general public.

Commentary
Why do we care about this?  Personally it has been a curiosity to me and I did this to see how large of an affect this is on the PC(USA) membership statistics.  While it is noticeable it is not significant.

In a larger sense we care because the loss of members is not a good thing.  If this tide can be stemmed it will not in itself stop the denominations slide, but it will be a step in that direction.

But maybe the thing I personally find troubling is how small a contributing factor this really is.  How much time, money, energy, polity, and concern has been poured into 6% of the lost membership.  In so many conversations this has been the focus.  What if we took the same energy for the other 94% who just leave the church?  Could we get a better return on our efforts there?

I’ll keep playing with these numbers and it will be interesting to see if the trend continues to accelerate.  It probably will because I stopped my 2008 list after the first six months and I already had 12 churches on the list.  And if you see a flaw in my methodology please let me know where I slipped up.