An Interesting Trend In PC(USA) Amendment Voting

I was checking out the redesigned web site of The Layman.  It is a clean looking site that uses ASP and CSS and no longer uses the frames.  It is a nice design, navigation seems good, and I like the “Other Headlines” section where they have consolidated all their news together.  I’m not a big fan of having that top navigation bar big and black, but that is my opinion.

Anyway, I was checking out the web site and having a look at their chart on the voting for Amendment B and noticed an interesting trend.  No, it is not the fact that the vote currently stands at no presbyteries for and six against.  What I noticed, and have now crunched the numbers on, was the total number of votes cast and how it differs from the last go-round.

Briefly, if you compare the number of votes cast in each presbytery with the total number cast in 2001-02 you find that the numbers are all between 72% and 87% of the votes cast last time.  Why?

The two obvious culprits are the drop in PC(USA) membership and “issue fatigue.”  I think it is probably a combination of the two.

If you consider the statistics between the end of 2001 and the end of 2007 you find that in 2007 the number of churches was 97% of what it was in 2001 and the number of members was 89% of what it was in 2001.  The number of commissioners to presbytery will reflect both of these numbers since each church is assured of two, the pastor and an elder, but larger churches have extra commissioners.

[OK, this is a “back of the envelope” calculation and I am well aware of several other issues that make my description above not as simple as I have presented.  These include:  The fact that a church with an empty or shared pulpit may only have an elder commissioner.  That presbyteries may have “extra” clergy because of seminaries, retirement communities, larger numbers of ministers in validated ministries, that sort of thing.  That would be adjusted under the redress of imbalance.]

The drop is larger than the membership drop so that can’t be it alone.  To address the “issue fatigue” I looked at the changes in the numbers of Yes and No votes.  I consider it interesting that every count of No votes declined, and it falls in the same range as the total vote decline.  On the one hand, this is not surprising since each of these presbyteries voted “No” so the majority of no votes will have the greater influence on the total numbers.  But there is some variability with the drop in negative votes sometimes higher and sometimes lower than the drop in total.

This is in marked contrast to the affirmative votes where in some cases a small number of votes causes the percentages to swing wildly.  The votes range from 22% of the number from last time to 106%, but in the case of the 22% and a 44%, these are less than 10 votes so small changes can be amplified.  Two of the other four are in the range of the total decline, and one shows only minor decline (98% – one vote) and one showed a slight increase (106% – one vote).  In general, the affirmative votes are holding steadier than the negative votes.

To summarize, negative votes show a fairly consistent decline in excess of the membership decline, the more substantial yes votes show a change that is at worst in the range of the negative vote decline.

I do realize that there are numerous other explanations for the drop in voting.  It could be because these are early votes and “get out the vote” campaigns have not been active yet.  It could be because these presbyteries have implemented an “active participation” policy among the honorably retired ministers under G-11.0101b and so have a smaller “redress of imbalance.”  (You will probably see this in my presbytery.)  Anyway, membership decline and “issue fatigue” may not be the only reason numbers are down.

What does this mean?  I’m not really sure yet but I’ll keep an eye on the trend.  It at least reflects the decline in the membership of the denomination.  But since the numbers are in excess of the decline there appears to be something else going on here which I would attribute to “issue fatigue.”  It would make sense that both of these effects would show up more in the negative votes since those are the churches realigning or thinking about it.

4 thoughts on “An Interesting Trend In PC(USA) Amendment Voting

  1. Christine Kooi

    All the reasons you suggest seem plausible to me. I would also add as a factor the defection of congregations to the EPC and such like. My presbytery has shrunk by four congregations in the past couple of years.

    Reply
  2. Steve

    Christine,
    You are absolutely correct. The problem that I have been working on is how many members just leave and how many leave as a church for another denomination, usually the EPC. The statistics as presented by the PC(USA) make it difficult to determine good numbers for the church departures. There is no division of those who leave individually and those that leave as a group, except for the congregations that are transferred. If they just disaffiliate it is the same as closed. If the PC(USA) finds a “true church” and continues the congregation then it does not even show up as a loss of a congregation. That is partly why the number of congregations is still 97% of what it was in 2001.

    While I am hoping to drill into the statistics at some point and figure out some better departure numbers, I knowingly lumped everything together as “membership drop” since that is a clear number reported.

    As has been said, there are three types of lies…

    (This is funny — when I went to a web site for attribution of this to Benjamin Disraeli that site lists an additional variation of this quote by him:  There are lies, damned lies, and church statistics.)

    Reply
  3. Christine

    Have the EPC or New Wineskins published any statistics on the PC(USA)
    congregations that have defected to them in the last few years? That is, both numbers of congregations and the actual membership sizes of those congregations? I can’t find any such statistics on the their websites. It would be interesting to get some sense of the numbers.

    Reply
  4. Steve

    Membership numbers are tough to come by. However, the number of churches that have gone over to the EPC specifically is easier — sort of.

    According to the EPC web site there is a National Transitional Presbytery that has two churches and a New Wineskines Transitional Presbytery that has 37 churches. Looking at the PC(USA) statistics from 2001 through 2007 there were only 31 churches dismissed. In the same time period 414 churches were dissolved. Now, the EPC number includes 2008 churches (Fair Oaks is in there) so you could probably make it to 39 including 2008 realignments.

    The Layman Online list has 57 churches going to the EPC out of 66 on the
    list. If the Layman list is accurate the EPC list needs some updating
    and some of those churches have not completed the acceptance process
    yet.  And the PC(USA) statistics have the added complexity that it might also include some of those nine other churches that went somewhere other than the EPC.

    Looking at all this I know the PC(USA) statistics miss churches that went to the EPC when the PC(USA) was able to keep a continuing church in place. I am also pretty sure that some are included in the dissolved, but that is more difficult to quantify. I’ll try to sit down with various sources and see what I can piece together.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *