Well, the numbers are out and, to no ones surprise, the membership in the Presbyterian Church (USA) continues to decline. The annual numbers for 2006 are contained in a press release from the Presbyterian News Service as well as detailed statistics and commentary in the current (June) issue of the Office of the General Assembly’s on-line publication Perspectives. Looking back at past issues of Perspectives I see that the 2004 stats were also published there in the June 2005 issue with less commentary (at least direct commentary). [It looks like when they don’t have a GA to float them at they go to Perspectives.]
In reading through the associated articles there are some good points made but in some places they appear more like analyzing the obvious or spin. In the former, I give you a couple of lines from the end of the article by Kris Valerius (manager of OGA statistics) titled “The Rest of the Story“:
The bottom line: For
growth to appear, our overall losses need to go down and our overall
gains need to go up. The 2006 picture shows we lost fewer people, but
we also brought fewer into the church. Not the formula for growth.
A few other statistics are mentioned in that article, but I’ll take a closer look at those in a minute.
The rest of the articles take a look at the statistics from various views including “look forward and not back” or “look beyond the numbers to the vibrant and faithful congregations” or “today’s young people are not joiners and membership numbers don’t tell the whole story.” The latter item is a very valid point and while worship attendance is reported by congregations the OGA does not report these numbers in this statistical summary. I did appreciate the articles by Clark D. Cowden and Eric Hoey who view the numbers as a wake-up call. Rev. Cowden writes how the church needs to be missional and reaching out and Rev. Hoey looks at the number of adult baptisms reported and their steep decline in the last three years and says something similar about spreading the gospel.
Being a bit of a geek, well actually a major geek and a research scientist, I have gone back a couple more years to get as much info as I could quickly. Combining this year’s stats with those published in 2005 gives six years data (2001-2006) to better analyze trends. The interesting thing is that in this data there are few statistically strong trends. However, three trends come through “loud and clear” and two more are significant.
The first two statistically significant trends are for the decline in the number of congregations and decline in total membership. (By “statistically significant I mean that the linear regression has an R-squared of almost 1 (in case you care)). The six year trend in congregation decline is 47 congregations/year and in membership it is 45,469 members/year. To put this into perspective, this is a loss of one medium sized presbytery worth of churches and one large presbytery in terms of members.
The other strong trend is the growth in ordained ministers at an average of 41 per year. While some of the writers are correct that in pointing out that this is an encouraging trend, it is also disturbing to realize that even with more ministers it is not doing any good at growing the membership.
In addition, there are weaker trends ( R-squared of 0.55 and 0.80 respectively) in the slight decline in churches received and the trend in the increasing number of churches dismissed. Both of these are small numbers, but the recent history of a beginning exodus of chruches to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church may reinforce this trend in the coming year. Stay tuned.