Well, yesterday was July 1 – so a happy belated Canada Day to our friends north of the border.

It is also about the time of year that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) releases their annual membership statistics and right on schedule the Stated Clerk released them yesterday.  While the full comparative statistics will take a little bit longer, now we have the Summary Statistics, Miscellaneous Information, and the Press Release. In addition, you can find commentary on the numbers from The Layman, and I would expect the Presbyterian Outlook to have an article shortly and probably a few more entities will weigh in as well. 

Running through the numbers I don’t see much change in direction of any of the categories.  Here are a few of the numbers and their change from 2009 to 2010.

Yes, there are plenty more statistics but these are the ones related to membership that have a consistent trend, usually down, over the last three years. And yes, the PC(USA) is still above 2 million members so those that had numbers in the pool below 2 mil are out of luck, but at a loss of 61 thousand a year, we will see that next year.

The losses actually had some interesting variation this year.  For example, losses by certificate (transfer) have bounced around a bit but in this year the numbers bounced up 2,058 to 29,835.  That is still less than the 2008 losses by certificate of 34,340. Interestingly, the other losses, that is the people who left without transfer, hit a low for the last eleven years of 88,731, down from 100,253 last year.

So what does this mean in terms of breaking out the causes of decline.  The losses from transfer of members to the Church Triumphant (those that died) was 32,471 or -1.56%.  The internal replenishment rate in the form of youth joining the church was 18.895 or +0.91%. So our internal loss was 13,576 or  -0.65%.  By transfer the church gained 21,615 and lost 29,835 for a net of -8220 or -0.40%.  Adult profession of faith and other brought in 49,480 members while other losses were 88,731 for a net of -39251 or -1.89%.

Therefore, we can say that of the 2.94% decline, 0.65% is the deficit in internal replacement, 0.40% is the imbalance in transfers, and almost two-thirds is in the imbalance of those coming and leaving without formal transfer.

Regarding the ordained officers of the church there is a bit less clarity.  This first release always gives the total number of teaching elders (ministers) but we will have to wait a bit longer for the release of the bigger report to know how many are active ministers and how many are honorably retired. Last year, of 21,235 ministers 13,400 were listed as active.

The number of ruling elders listed I usually figure is the number currently serving on session.  With 10,560 churches and 86,777 elders that comes to an average of 8.22 per church.  (In case you are interested that is down from 9.26/church in 2001.)  The interesting thing of course is that while this is labeled “elders” we know it is not all the elders because the last Presbyterian Panel report says 21% of the members of the church have been ordained as ruling elders — so there should be closer to 423,379.  (An interesting juxtaposition with a workshop at Big Tent yesterday where the message was that “Being an elder is a ‘perpetual calling.'”)

Finally, I am never sure what to do with the candidates line because the full statistics always have a different number, a difference I have attributed to taking the “snapshot” at different times during the year.  For example, the new summary lists 1182 candidates in 2009 while the full comparative statistics list 1154. Another reason for the difference could be the data coming from different sources.

Anyway, for what follows I will just use the numbers as they appear in this preliminary release and the equivalent ones from earlier years.

I wanted to look at how all these categories are changing with time and relative to one another.  So taking the data back to 2001 I normalized each category to that year.  That is to say I took all the data in a category and divided it by the 2001 value so they all start at a value of 1 for that year and proportional changes can be seen more clearly.  Here is what I get:

Now we can see that the fastest declining category is the total membership of the church closely followed by the number of ruling elders.  One interpretation is that ruling elders are departing the church at almost the same rate at other members, but that would not be correct.  Remember that this number is actually a measure of those serving on sessions so it means that sessions are decreasing in size proportionate with the decrease in membership, not the decrease in the number of congregations.  I’m open to suggestions about why this might be – smaller sessions for smaller churches? smaller sessions to be more efficient? smaller sessions because the pool of ruling elders is decreasing?  An interesting topic for future thought.

For the other numbers, the number of churches has decreased slightly (5% over 10 years), the number of teaching elders has held very steady over that time, and the number of candidates has shown significant growth.  Clearly we have a window of opportunity with this abundance of candidates to revitalize congregations and develop those 1001 new worshiping communities.

At this point I think I’ll wrap this up leaving the finances completely untouched.  Echoing the sentiments of the Stated Clerk, I have found Presbyterians to be a very generous bunch, especially when the mission is compelling.  So the question is, with the denomination positioned in this present situation what compelling mission is out there for the financial and human resources that are at our disposal. There is apparently a lot of talent in the pipeline — I hope they are ready for some creative and out-of-the box ministry.