FactChecker: Are All Christian Denominations in Decline? Which ones are growing and declining?

In a recent interview in which she announced she had joined the Episcopal Church, Rachel Held Evans said,

Just about every denomination in the American church— including many evangelical denominations — is seeing a decline in numbers, so if it’s a competition, then we’re all losing, just at different rates.

Many Americans, both within and outside the church, share Evans perception of the decline of denominations. But is it true? Are most denominations truly seeing a decline in numbers?

The fact is that the percentage of people identifying as Protestant has declined since the 1970s while the total number of Protestants has increased (62 percent of Americans identified as Protestant in 1972 and only 51 percent did so in 2010). Yet because of the population increase in the U.S., there were 28 million more Protestants in 2010 than in 1972.

So did Protestantism in America decline since the 1970s? Yes (percentwise) and no (total numbers).

What about when we drill down to the denominations that comprise Protestantism in America? Here the differences depend on whether we look at short-term or long-term trends.

If we look at the short-term (year-to-year) trends, we may be able to detect a decline in some groups, especially in large denominations. For instance, the membership of the Southern Baptist Convention—the largest Protestant denomination in America—declined by 105,708 from 2011 to 2012. While that sounds like a lot of people, the denomination could lose that many members every year for 150 years before the pews in SBC churches would be completely empty.

In the case of the SBC, and other conservative denominations, the trend seems to be that they’re losing members to other conservative denominations, especially non-denominational ones. As of 2010, four percent of Americans (12,200,000) worshipped in a nondenominational church. There are almost as many members of nondenominational churches as there are members of the SBC—and almost as many as in all of the mainline churches combined. A decline in a conservative denominational church is often offset by an increase in a conservative non-denominational church.

When tracking changes to gauge the overall health of a denomination, it makes more sense to look at long-term trends. If we look back 50 years (to 1965) we can see a clear and unequivocal trendline: liberal denominations have declined sharply while conservative denominations have increased or remained the same.

Here are the primary mainline denominations, every one of which has seen long-term decline in membership:

In 1965, the CC(DoC) had 1,918,471 members. In 2012, the membership was 625,252, a decline of 67 percent.

In 1967, the RCA had 384,751 members. In 2014, the membership was 145,466, a decline of 62 percent.

In 1965, the UCC had 2,070,413 members. In 2012, there were 998,906 members, a decline of 52 percent.

In 1966, the TEC had 3,647,297 members. By 2013, the membership was 1,866,758, a decline of 49 percent.

(Those numbers should be even lower, though, since those figures by the TEC include breakaway churches trying to leave the denomination.)

In 1967, the PC(USA) had 3,304,321 members. In 2013, the membership was 1,760,200, a decline of 47 percent.

In 1967, the UMC had 11,026,976 members. In 2012, the membership was 7,391,911, a decline of 33 percent.

In 1987, the ECLA had 5,288,230 members. In 2013, the membership was 3,863,133, a decline of 27 percent.

(Note: The ELCA was formally constituted in 1988 as a merger of the Lutheran Church in America, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches and the American Lutheran Church.)

In 1967, the ABC/USA had 1,335,342 members. In 2012, the membership was 1,308,054, a decline of 2 percent.

(Note: The ABC/USA has been able to stem its decline among white congregants by replacing them with African American and Hispanic members.)

Now let’s look at a few of the primary non-mainline denominations, almost every one of which has increased in membership since the mid-1960s.

In 1965, the CoG had 425,000 members. In 2012, the membership was 5,499,875, an increase of 1,194 percent.

In 1973, the PCA had 41,232 members. In 2013, the membership was 367,033, an increase of 790 percent.

(Note: The Presbyterian Church in America was founded in 1974 by conservative members of the Presbyterian Church in the United States who rejected that church's merger with the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.)

In 1965, the EFCA had 43,851 members. In 2013, the membership was 372,321 , an increase of 749 percent.

In 1965, the AoG had 572,123 members. In 2013, the membership was 3,030,944, an increase of 430 percent.

In 1951, the AME had 1,166,301 members. In 2012, the membership was 2,500,000, an increase of 114 percent.

In 1965, the SBC had 10,770,573 members. In 2013, the membership was 15,735,640, an increase of 46 percent.

In 1965, the LCMS had 2,692,889 members. In 2012, the membership was 2,163,698, a decline of 20 percent.

Mainliners may try to comfort themselves by claiming that every denomination is in decline, but it’s simply not true. While conservative churches aren’t growing as quickly as they once were, mainline churches are on a path toward extinction. The mainline churches are finding that as they move further away from Biblical Christianity, the closer they get to their inevitable demise.

I think you have this confused with the Nicene Creed ...

No, I did not confuse the Apostles' Creed with the Nicene Creed. Very specifically, the early church formulation did not smack of catholicity, and the word "catholic: was not a part of the earliest "Old Roman Creed" (click here).

The propagation of the Way of Christ in the first days was thero;ugh the formation of local independent autonomous assemblies of believers each governed by a plurality of elders as appointed by the first and only apostle/prophets, which office was discontinued un their deaths. Catholicity was not a part of the universal Gospel.

The concept of catholicity in government was present in the beliefs of a very few prominent teachers like Irenaeus of Antioch, but not put into practice until it was instituted by Augustine, creating a statist church headed by Constantine and administered by his selected bishops.

hundreds of years after Jesus' death.

According to the Bible there is only one univresal church, and it is located in Heaven, not on earth, as the Romanists would have it.

Believers congregating locally, joined by profession of faith and immersion of the believer in the rite of water baptism, and reporting directly to its Creator, Savior, and Lord without any intermediary layer of government exterior to the locally appointed members of the assembly, is the form that the true Christianity has taken from the beginning. It has never united with the Catholicism of Augustine, Roman or Greek, and has remained independent of those always.

Have I made that position clear? That is the stance of Baptists everywhere, and withut question differentiates them from the Roman Catholic and non-Roman Catholics of whom the Protestant Reformers comprise a part.

Thank you! I had actually not been aware of that. Short Scriptural and simple, though a faithful Cath would say they believe it, it is what they add to it that is a problem.

Though under the apostles they and the elders provided a Scriptural central magisterial function as seen in Acts 15, but which is not what Catholicism foisted upon souls or seduced them with.

Paul Johnson, educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, author of over 40 books and a conservative popular historian, finds,

The Church was now a great and numerous force in the empire, attracting men of wealth and high education, inevitably, then, there occurred a change of emphasis from purely practical development in response to need, to the deliberate thinking out of policy. This expressed itself in two ways: the attempt to turn Christianity into a philosophical and political system, and the development of controlling devices to prevent this intellectualization of the faith from destroying it. The twin process began to operate in the early and middle decades of the third century, with Origen epitomizing the first element and Cyprian the second.

The effect of Origen’s work was to create a new science, biblical theology, whereby every sentence in the scriptures was systematically explored for hidden [much prone to metaphorical] meanings, different layers of meanings, allegory and so forth.....

Cyprian [c. 200 – September 14, 258] came from a wealthy family with a tradition of public service to the empire; within two years of his conversion he was made a bishop. He had to face the practical problems of persecution, survival and defence against attack. His solution was to gather together the developing threads of ecclesiastical order and authority and weave them into a tight system of absolute control...the confession of faith, even the Bible itself lost their meaning if used outside the Church.

With Cyprian, then, the freedom preached by Paul and based on the power of Christian truth was removed from the ordinary members of the Church, it was retained only by the bishops, through whom the Holy Spirit still worked, who were collectively delegated to represent the totality of Church members...With Bishop Cyprian, the analogy with secular government came to seem very close. But of course it lacked one element: the ‘emperor figure’ or supreme priest...

[Peter, according to Cyprian, was] the beneficiary of the famous ‘rock and keys’ text in Matthew. There is no evidence that Rome exploited this text to assert its primacy before about 250 - and then...Paul was eliminated from any connection with the Rome episcopate and the office was firmly attached to Peter alone...

...There was in consequence a loss of spirituality or, as Paul would have put it, of freedom... -(A History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson, pp. 51 -61,63. transcribed using OCR software)

deformation of the church was seen under Damasus 1 (366-384) who began his reign by employing a gang of thugs in seeking to secure his chair, which carried out a three-day massacre of his rivals supporters. Yet true to form, Rome made him a "saint."

• Upon Pope Liberius's death September 24 A.D. 366, violent disorders broke out over the choice of a successor. A group who had remained consistently loyal to Liberius immediately elected his deacon Ursinus in the Julian basilica and had him consecrated Bishop, but the rival faction of Felix's adherence elected Damasus, who did not hesitate to consolidate his claim by hiring a gang of thugs, storming the Julian Basilica in carrying out a three-day massacre of the Ursinians.

On Sunday, October 1 his partisans seized the Lateran Basilica, and he was there consecrated. He then sought the help of the city prefect (the first occasion of a Pope in enlisting the civil power against his adversaries), and he promptly expelled Ursinus and his followers from Rome. Mob violence continued until October 26, when Damasus's men attacked the Liberian Basilica, where the Ursinians had sought refuge; the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus reports that they left 137 dead on the field. Damasus was now secure on his throne; but the bishops of Italy were shocked by the reports they received, and his moral authority was weakened for several years....

Damasus was indefatigable in promoting the Roman primacy, frequently referring to Rome as 'the apostolic see' and ruling that the test of a creed's orthodoxy was its endorsement by the Pope.... This [false claim to] succession gave him a unique [presumptuous claim to] judicial power to bind and loose, and the assurance of this infused all his rulings on church discipline. — Kelly, J. N. D. (1989). The Oxford Dictionary of Popes. USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 32 ,34;

• Eamon Duffy (Former president of Magdalene College and member of Pontifical Historical Commission, and current Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge) and provides more on the Roman church becoming more like the empire in which it was found as a result of state adoption of (an already deformed) Christianity:

The conversion of Constantine had propelled the Bishops of Rome into the heart of the Roman establishment...They [bishops of Rome] set about [creating a Christian Rome] by building churches, converting the modest tituli (community church centres) into something grander, and creating new and more public foundations, though to begin with nothing that rivaled the great basilicas at the Lateran and St. Peter’s...

These churches were a mark of the upbeat confidence of post-Constantinian Christianity in Rome. The popes were potentates, and began to behave like it. Damasus perfectly embodied this growing grandeur. An urbane career cleric like his predecessor Liberius, at home in the wealthy salons of the city, he was also a ruthless power-broker, and he did not he did not hesitate to mobilize both the city police and [a hired mob of gravediggers with pickaxes] to back up his rule…

Self-consciously, the popes began to model their actions and their style as Christian leaders on the procedures of the Roman state. — Eamon Duffy “Saints and Sinners”, p. 37,38

More by God's grace.

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