I have found it interesting that more than a month after the release of statistics about the viewpoints of members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) one particular statistic out of that report has “gone viral” on Twitter and in the blogosphere.

The report is the latest Presbyterian Panel profile that I mentioned last month when I commented not on the numbers themselves but on the use of terminology in the introductory material.

The 54 page report is full of interesting stuff that I am still digesting but the numbers that caught someone’s attention, and has now been retweeted a million times, is this one as listed in the narrative section of the report:

Members are divided about the necessity of belief in Christ for salvation… Two in five members (39%) “agree” or “strongly agree” and 36% “disagree” or “strongly disagree” that “only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved.” More elders “agree” or “strongly agree” (45%) than “disagree” or “strongly disagree” (31%) with the statement. More pastors disagree (45%) than agree (35%). A majority of specialized clergy (60%) disagree.

Let’s take this apart.  First, it is important to know the question that was asked (see page A-14 of the report):

Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with…the following statement: only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved.

Now, in looking at the responses it is important to realize that there is the terminology problem with their categories that I noted in the previous posts: When the survey uses the term “elders” it means those in the church who are ruling elders currently serving on session.  When the report uses the term “member” it means all the rest, that is everyone else who is not a teaching elder or ruling elder serving on session.  In other words, when the term “member” is used it means a mix of ruling elders not currently on session, deacons, and church members not ordained to a church office.  It is interesting to note that according to the report 21% of “members” have been ordained as elders only, 19% as deacons only, and 16% have been ordained as both an elder and deacon.  That means that there is a category for “elder” and then 37% of the “members” category are also ruling elders.  (And while the numbers would probably be fairly small, I would also be curious how many of the “members” have been released from the exercise of ordained office or had given up their ordinations all together.)  It also means that a minority (43%) of the “members” are not officers of the church.  And it is interesting to note that “elders” were the best at returning the survey (79%), “ministers” next at 70%, and “members” only returned 59%.  So within the mixed category of “member” were any of the different components (ruling elders, deacons, non-ordained) more or less likely to return the survey?

(Three quick points of commentary on these numbers:  1) I won’t discuss it further now, but there seem to be some important implications for a church when a majority of the members are ordained officers in the church.  2) Does breaking out the opinions of only the ruling elders currently serving on session reinforce the too common belief that our ordination as an elder only really matters when we are serving on session?  3) What I would really like to see is the panel profile break out the opinions of the non-ordained members, or am I missing that in the report?)

So getting back to the question asked in the survey, here is how respondents agreed with “only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved.”

Response	Members	Members (non-elders)	Elders	Pastors	Specialized Clergy
strongly agree	25%	24%	27%	21%	12%
agree	14%	12%	18%	14%	10%
neutral or not sure	25%	26%	23%	20%	18%
disagree	19%	19%	19%	24%	24%
strongly disagree	17%	20%	12%	21%	36%

 
A couple of notes: 1) The “Members (non-elders)” category is my adjustment of the members number based on the (possibly risky) assumption that the ruling elders mixed in with the members have the same opinions as the “elders” category.  While tempting to extrapolate that deacons think like ruling elders, I won’t take the correction that far. 2) In the survey of the 1453 “ministers” that responded there were 982 pastors (67.6%) and 471 in specialized ministry (32.4%). This is a very close match to the 31.9% of “Active Ministers” that are not in parish ministry according to the 2008 Membership Statistics.  3) Finally, the margin of error is reported as +4% so that differences of less than 8% are not statistically significant.

What does all this mean?  First, with one exception, members, members (non-elders), elders and pastors all responded the same within the margin of error.  The one exception is that the 21% of pastors that strongly disagreed was statistically meaningfully above the 12% of elders with that response.  The other important difference is that on the extremes the specialized clergy were statistically different from every other category with less strongly agreeing (9 to 15% less) and more strongly disagreeing (15 to 24% more).

If we now consider the “orthodox” answer to this question to be that there is “salvation in Christ alone” (cf. Westminster Larger Catechism Q. 60) the most interesting thing is that the most orthodox category is the ruling elders with 45% of respondents either agreeing or strongly agreeing.  To be fair, combining boxes like that raises the uncertainty of the combined values to +5.6% so now an 11% spread between results is necessary making the only statistically distinct difference between the specialized ministry category and all the other ones.  On the other end, the first four groups disagree or strongly disagree with the statement from about 31% to 45% so pastors are distinguishable from elders.  Those in specialized ministry expressed 60% disagreement.

Clearly, if subscription to the Westminster Standards were still a requirement for ordination in the mainline American Presbyterian church a sizable group would be declaring a departure.  Here is where I would be interested in what the non-ordained members believe because all that is required for membership is affirmation of Jesus Christ as savior.  It is when we become ordained that we agree to be “instructed and led” by the confessions.

Looking at the preceding question in the survey does raise some questions about how the respondents interpreted the statement “only followers of Jesus can be saved.”  The question before it was “the only absolute truth for humankind is in Jesus Christ.”  For this statement there was significantly more agreement with that statemen
t.

Response	Members	Members (non-elders)	Elders	Pastors	Specialized Clergy
strongly agree	38%	34%	44%	42%	25%
agree	21%	19%	24%	24%	19%
neutral or not sure	20%	22%	17%	12%	15%
disagree	13%	14%	11%	17%	25%
strongly disagree	7%	9%	4%	5%	15%

So there is a significant shift to agreement with the statement that Jesus is absolute truth.  In fact, now 20%, 23%, 15%, 22%, and 40% disagree or strongly disagree with the statement.  The drop is 15% to 20% in all categories.  This is more reassuring about the strength of the orthodox viewpoints in the PC(USA) and seems to point to a natural human reaction that it is more comfortable to talk about the relatively impersonal idea of Jesus as absolute truth but being less comfortable when it gets to the personal by saying that my neighbor is not saved if they don’t believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.  Or, I could be over-explaining this because the responses to the statement “all the world’s different religions are equally good ways of helping a person find ultimate truth” look more like the responses, actually the reversed responses, to “only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved.”

Besides the tweets there has been response on blogs as well — I will highlight two of those.  First, the blog that has probably been the most heavily linked to is the comment on all this by the Rev. Albert Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY.  He looks at the results of the survey in the context of the overall decline and his perceived liberalization of the PC(USA).  There is also an interesting article on Stand Firm that takes issue with the design and reporting of the survey which in their opinion was poor on both counts and hides some of the results.

That is enough drilling into these statistics for today, but I want to turn to another set of statistics that was just released, the denominational membership statistics in the National Council of Churches yearbook.  (For one take on the relationship of information in the panel survey to the NCC membership changes see my search for a correlation last year.)

First, a quick review of the source of the NCC data:  The data is self-reported by the denominations.  Some are not as into statistics as the PC(USA) so their data should be viewed as round numbers.  For example, the National Baptist Convention reports an even 5 million members with no update reported.  In fact 12 of the 25 largest churches did not report updates.  Additionally, the number of members reported here is not necessarily the same category of members reported elsewhere.  The PC(USA) reports 2,844,952 in the NCC report but only 2,140,165 in the statistical report.  Clearly the NCC number is a broader measure of membership including baptized children and maybe inactive members while the in-house statistical report is only active communicant members on which per capita is collected.

So what did the NCC say?  Five of the 25 largest denominations reported gains: Jehovah’s Witnesses (+2.00%), Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), (+1.76%), Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (+1.71%), Roman Catholic (+1.49%), and the Assemblies of God (+1.27%).  As mentioned, twelve did not report and the remaining eight declined: Southern Baptist Convention (-0.24%), United Methodist Church (-0.98%), Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (-1.62), Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod (-1.92%), American Baptist Churches (-2.00%), The Episcopal Church (-2.81%), United Church of Christ (-2.93%), Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (-3.28%).

While some numbers look close to last year (e.g. SBC, ELCA) some have changed a bit (e.g. AOG from 0.96% to 1.27%, PC(USA) from -2.79% to -3.28%) and the UCC has significantly changed (from -6.01% to -2.93%).  I won’t redo the correlation chart from last year and instead leave any interpretation of the numbers as an exercise for the reader.  Have fun.