U.S., Canadian church growth trends persist
BY DAVID YONKE
BLADE RELIGION EDITOR
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Dr. John C. Green Dr. John C. Green Enlarge
Growing churches continue to grow and declining churches continue to decline, according to the latest statistics reported in the 2011 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches.
Virtually all mainline Protestant denominations continue their decades-long drop in membership, while the Catholic Church and most of the larger conservative Protestant bodies are gaining members.
“What the data show is that the trends that have been going on for a long time now continue,” said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. “Mainline Protestant churches continue to decline in membership, and many of the evangelical churches like the Assemblies of God or other conservative denominations like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, continue to show increases.”
Eileen Lindner, the yearbook’s editor, said in the book that the rate of growth or decline has “generally slowed in comparison to recent years.”
The figures are based on self-reported data collected in 2009 by 227 national church bodies and reported in 2010 to the yearbook, which is published by the New York-based National Council of Churches.
Among the findings in the yearbook that was published this week:
- The Catholic Church, the nation’s largest, reported growth of 0.57 percent to 68,503,456 members.
- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, grew 1.42 percent to 6,058,907 members.
- The Assemblies of God grew 0.52 percent to 2,914,669 members.
Mainline Protestant churches reporting a drop in membership included the United Methodist Church, down 1.01 percent to 7,774,931 members; the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, down 1.96 percent to 4,542,868 members; the Presbyterian Church (USA), down 2.61 percent to 2,770,730 members; the Episcopal Church, down 2.48 percent to 2,006,343 members, and the United Church of Christ, down 2.83 percent to 1,080,199 members.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant body, declined 0.42 percent to 16,160,088 members.
Other denominations posting continued growth include Jehovah’s Witnesses, up 2 percent to 1,092,169 members, and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.), up 1.76 percent to 1,053,642 members.
But today even the individual denomination of "Evangelical" Protestant outnumbers Roman Catholics at 26%.
Evangelical Protestants outnumber Catholics by 26.3 percent (59 million) to 24 percent (54 million) of the population, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, a massive 45-question poll conducted last summer of more than 35,000 American adults. “There is no question that the demographic balance has shifted in past few decades toward evangelical churches,” said Greg Smith, a research fellow at the Pew Forum. “They are now the mainline of American Protestantism.” "Evangelical Christianity has become the largest religious tradition in this country, supplanting Roman Catholicism, which is slowly bleeding members, according to a survey released yesterday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.