Posted on 02/14/2011 5:54:53 PM PST by SmithL
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 4,542,868 members, down 1.96 percent.Yeah, sure, whatever. I think they're lowballing their losses.
I finally left the pro-choice Presbyterian Church USA over 10 years ago.
They even give abortion coverage to pastors and their families in their medical plan.
I'm now a member of the conservative Wesleyan denomination.
agreed.
I am surprised to see the Southern Baptists and LCMS down. The more recent trend has shown conservative (read Gospel preaching) do much better than liberal churches (read social justice types)
“Abortion for any reason, at any time during pregnancy, is a covered service of the Presbyterian USA denomination’s plan. The coverage includes partial birth abortion; it includes abortion by means of chemicals, such as RU-486; it includes abortions for minor dependent daughters with no requirement for parental notification.”
http://www.ppl.org/MedBenPlan_2002.html
I'm reflecting on the UCC. I grew up in the UCC during the fifties and sixties, in a small village in Ohio of about a thousand people. Probably a good hundred and fifty were UCC church members. Maybe more. Now, The UCC members are nationally, 1 in 300. That means my old church on average would now have three members in it.
What a statement about the viability of political indoctination replacing the Gospel.
Percentage wise their losses are modest compared to say the Prebys, Elcans, UCCers, and Piskies.
My guess — based partly on what I see around where I live, anectodally, is that Southern Baptist youth are going nondenominational.... A lot of the nondenom movement that I see — and again, I’m going only anecdotally, so I could totally be wrong — is rebranded Baptist.
In my neck of the woods five UCC congregations have departed from the denomination: two to the Evangelical Covenant Church, one each to the Reforemd Church in America and Reformed Presbyterian; and one strictly independent. There is at least one other “in the pipeline”.
They have several different Baptist groups in the list and they are not accounting for the Non-denominational churches.
I am a member of a large Non-denom church that is led by a former Baptist pastor. If you looked at the practices of this church you would say it's Baptist.
Of course, the aggregate numbers are only as good as the sum of the reports of the individual churches. Some of them I wouldn't throw a stick at.Many congregations never take anyone off of their roles unless they get a letter saying someone has left.
Some congregations have figured out that the time to evaluate their roster is before they schedule an important vote. This comes after several congregation passed a first vote to leave the ELCA and then were totally caught off-guard by all the people who showed up to vote "no" at the second vote.
That's my guess as well.
Isn't there some self-satisfied video about not being "Christian" but rather a "Christ-follower"? Perhaps there's a quirky movement to not identify oneself as Christian, but still believe in the Bible and prayer:
Even among the unaffiliated (~25% of Americans), it turns out many of them are religious.Some of these respondents are just saying what the pollster wants to hear, but I'd wager a lot are into DIY Christianity - which can be spiritually perilous, but probably better than nothing.Thought they rarely attend religious services, more than half (56 percent) of them believe in God and another 22 percent believe in a higher power. Fifty-five percent believe that the Bible is either the literal or inspired Word of God and 49 percent pray daily or weekly.
This phenomenon also slightly skews the poll numbers towards secularism and a post-Christian America, giving ammo to the wrong people.
I am surprised to see the Southern Baptists and LCMS down. The more recent trend has shown conservative (read Gospel preaching) do much better than liberal churches (read social justice types)
SBC internal critics such as Tom Ascol say the published numbers are grossly over what they should be. There's a lot more on the roles than show up on a Sunday. Still, even if they were a quarter their advertised size, they're pretty big.
The Catholic Church doesn't take you off the roles even after you've left, unless you do something drastic like deny your own baptism or die, making their growth statistics suspect at best.
"Roman Catholics, the largest U.S. church with a reported 69 million members, start counting baptized infants as members and often don’t remove people until they die. Most membership surveys don’t actually count who’s in the pews on Sunday. To be disenrolled, Catholics must write a bishop to ask that their baptisms be revoked..."
....it is possible, for example, to be born Catholic, married Methodist, die Lutheran and still be listed as a member of the 1 billion-member Roman Catholic Church....
"...The Catholic understanding of membership is that a person becomes a member upon baptism and remains a member for life," Gautier said. "Whether you show up at church or not is not what determines whether you're a member."
-- from the thread When It Comes to Church Membership Numbers, the Devil's in the Details
Catholics are leaving the faith at four times the rate that newcomers are joining. "Religious change is not simply a function of retention; it's a function of recruitment. It's both sides of the ledger," explains the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's Greg Smith. "In no other religious groups we looked at did we see this high a ratio people leaving versus joining."See also Roman Catholics total 64 million in U.S. ["counting Catholics is really more art than science"]
.... from the thread Does the American Catholic Church Have a Numbers Problem?
What I found amazing when delivering Christmas Free Dinner flyers to food banks is that
the Jason Lee Methodist Church (It’s an old landmark here.)
has two other churches in it.
Slavic Baptist
and
Mennonite Hispanic.
Figure that one out, huh?
not trying to flame-bait, but why is the LCMS down 1.08%? I was praying and hoping that they would get more adherents escaping from the ELCA.
Two local churches in my area house immigrant congregations - a Russian Baptist group and a Korean Methodist congregation.
That’s a legitimate question. Most people leaving the ELCA find close (or closed) communion and the LCMS prohibitions against women clergy to be dealbreakers.
thank you, I understand the difference between the LCM S and ELCA (it’s like light (LCMS) and darkness (ELCA)!), but what is the diff between LCM C and CORE and NALC?
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