Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Denominational growth and decline

Julia Duin reports on the newly reported statistics about denominational growth and decline:
It's always intriguing to see which churches have grown and which denominations have faded in the past year. According to the 2008 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (a Bible of sorts for us religion writers), the fastest-growing religious body in 2007 was the Jehovah's Witnesses at 2.25 percent.

Following them were the Mormons at 1.56 percent and the Roman Catholics at .87 percent. Compare this to last year's states that had the Catholics out front at 1.94 percent, followed by the Assemblies of God at 1.86 and the Mormons at 1.63.

The denomination with the biggest decrease is the Episcopalians at 4.15 percent.

There are all sorts of arguments why some of these figures on the list below are bogus. For instance, several of the historic black churches with the "no increase or decrease listed" after their name do not release statistics at all. So the membership figure after their name is a guess at best. Plus churches' standards for membership are different. Baptist groups tend to count only those who have made an adult profession of faith. More liturgical churches include any child that has been baptized.....

Here are the top 25:
  1. The Roman Catholic Church, 67,515,016 members, an increase of .87 percent.
  2. Southern Baptist Convention, 16,306,246 members, an increase of .22 percent.
  3. The United Methodist Church, 7,995,456 members, a decrease of .99 percent.
  4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 5,779,316 members, an increase of 1.56 percent.
  5. The Church of God in Christ, 5,499,875 members, no increase or decrease reported.
  6. National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., 5,000,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
  7. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 4,774,203 members, a decrease of 1.58 percent.
  8. National Baptist Convention of America, Inc., 3,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
  9. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 3,025,740 members, a decrease of 2.36 percent.
  10. Assemblies of God, 2,836,174 members, an increase of .19 percent.
  11. African Methodist Episcopal Church, 2,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
  12. National Missionary Baptist Convention of America, 2,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
  13. Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., 2,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
  14. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS), 2,417,997 members, a decrease of .94 percent.
  15. Episcopal Church, 2,154,572 members, a decrease of 4.15 percent.
  16. Churches of Christ, 1,639,495 members, no increase or decrease reported.
  17. Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, 1,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
  18. Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, Inc., 1,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
  19. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 1,443,405 members, an increase of .21 percent.
  20. American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A., 1,371,278 members, a decrease of 1.82 percent.
  21. United Church of Christ, 1,218,541 members, a decrease of 0.47 percent.
  22. Baptist Bible Fellowship International, 1,200,000, no increase or decrease reported.
  23. Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, 1,071,616 members, no increase or decrease reported.
  24. The Orthodox Church in America, 1,064,000, no increase or decrease reported.
  25. Jehovah's Witnesses, 1,069,530 members, an increase of 2.25 percent.
Washington Times, America's Newspaper

2 comments:

  1. I suspect these numbers are mostly meaningless. For example, to take the OCA numbers (listed at about 1 million). There are about 400 OCA parishes in the US. The roles list about 27,000 pledging members. Now that number is certainly far below the real membership tally because it doesn't include children ... but the real number cannot be anywhere near a million, either as that would require close to 2000 members per parish, which just ain't so.

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  2. I believe the numbers are those submitted by the denomination, so the validity probably varies a lot. As the article says, some of them must be guesses because no statistics were provided.

    The trend lines for the big old line denominations have been pretty consistent for a long time, though.

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