Analysis by John H. Adams, The Layman, August 9, 2012
The membership plunge in the Presbyterian Church (USA) has been steep for years, but nothing like what has happened in the last 14 years and especially the last four.
The annual trend is even larger losses numerically. Moreover, the denomination is likely to lose another huge chunk in 2012 as congregations continue to work through responses to the denomination’s vote to allow the ordination of men and women involved in same-sex relationships as well as other lingering departures from Reformed theology.
Then there’s the long wait until the General Assembly of 2014 when commissioners will be under pressure to approve same-gender marriages, an issue they pushed aside at the 2012 General Assembly, maybe to avoid a near-total collapse.
The denomination’s comparative statistics reveal an unrelenting march toward extinction unless – and this is always possible – God reforms it with a Great Awakening scale.
This article focuses on what has happened since 1983, the year of the remarriage of the former Presbyterian Church U.S. (Southern) and the United Presbyterian Church (Northern). They came together with the blessings of both denominations’ general assemblies to end the division that began with the Civil War in 1861.
The PCUSA, which began with a combined 3,131,228 members, began losing some immediately. During the first full 14 years of the PCUSA (1984-97), membership shrunk by 522,037, a rate of 37,288 per year, substantial losses but mild compared to the next 14 years.
From 1998-2011, the numbers joining the exodus skyrocketed to a total of 668,713 losses. That’s an annual average of 47,826 departing members per year. Furthermore, the losses are rising steadily. With a smaller base to skim, the PCUSA has had four straight years of losses of more than 3 per cent. The numerical average for those four years was 67,357. The average for the 24 years was less than 2 percent.
Of course, the losses are not all walkouts. They include deaths, people moving, etc. But they uncannily correspond to what the PCUSA has adopted as policy and theology. Yet the decision makers in the denomination seem to ignore the reality of a denomination slicing itself into pieces. They cry unity but don’t sow it.
The spinoff from the decline is evident in other data. Mission funding fell by $12.4 million in 2011. Total contributions decreased by $23 million. The Louisville czars are constantly pressuring the presbyteries to remit the full amount of the denomination’s per-capita requests. Therefore the presbyteries are pinned down financially so that they are thinning staffs and missions.
The larger picture warrants increasing skepticism that the denomination will survive the 21st century. At the current average of losses over the last 14 years – a time zone that is marked by the most radical changes in the denomination’s history – the lights will go out in about a half century.