In just about a week we can expect the membership statistics from the Presbyterian Church (USA) for the close of 2007.  In years that General Assembly meets the numbers are usually officially released as part of the GA.  It seems that there are rumors circulating that the membership loss, primarily due to churches disaffiliating and transferring, will be two to three times larger than last year.  One friend has seen an advanced copy of the new statistics and thinks they are in line with the preceding year.  When the official numbers and category break-downs are released we can see who is correct and what other interesting features we see in the data.  But this past week the Southern Baptist Convention at their annual meeting had to confront their stagnation in growth (16.30 million last year versus 16.27 million this year) and graying of their flock.  (Atlanta Journal Constitution article)

Over the last few months since the previous discussion back in March, and the release of the Pew Foundation report that was part of it, there have been a couple of other interesting items that have come up.

The first of these is a post at the end of May by Michael Kruse over at Kruse Kronicle titled “The Decline of Mainline Denominations… for 150 years?”  The data comes from the book The Churching of American, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark.  The point of that analysis is that while the number of members in mainline denominations began declining in the 1960’s, the growth of those denominations fell behind U.S. population growth about a century earlier.  And the graphs Michael posts are for denominational groups not individual branches.  But if you are looking at Presbyterians over the last century and a half you need to look at them in a way that deals with all the splitting and reuniting.

Also from the end of May, The Lead on the Episcopal Cafe web site pointed to a significant USA Today commentary about the study and the trends.  The commentary points out that the dominant trends of stable and growing “traditional” churches is either high birth rates or immigrants that keep the number up.  Mainline churches are in decline because they don’t benefit from either of these effects.  This was noted in the Pew report, but the point of the commentary was that the solution may be “Mainline Megachurches.”  Not a far-fetched idea from my experience since in my presbytery over 10% of the members are in one larger church which probably is not even large enough qualify as a megachurch.  And in the surrounding areas I can point to a few larger Presbyterian churches that seem to dominate the landscape.  However, I would also point out that in a quick evaluation of what I know about these churches they do strike me as tending to the evangelical side and a few are part of the New Wineskins movement and are considering departure.  I would not be surprised if the churches moving from Episcopal to Anglican would also fit into the same description.  But in line with the article from Michael Kruse these shifts are between denominational branches not across denominations.

While this may be a significant approach, as I have said previously my anecdotal evidence suggests that two out of three of my kids prefer the style, fellowship, and teaching they get at more evangelical non-mainline church youth groups.

But the last word on this for today comes from the six-year-old daughter of a friend of ours at church.  Now before I tell the story I would say that our church is a stable, multi-generational, 250-ish member PC(USA) congregation.  So, on the way to church today the child asks her dad why there are “so many old people” at our church.  The dad said that he gave an answer about the denomination being a “mature church” and tending to have more older people.  The girl responded “Then we need some new members because they are almost 100.”  While that may not be as much of a problem for our particular church, she pretty much nailed it for the denomination at large.