Like Presbyterians, Methodists now have lower attrition rate
The Layman Online, July 12, 1999
The United Methodist Church’s decades-long decline in membership continued to slow down in 1998, with the denomination posting its smallest decrease in its history. The reduced attrition rate is a trend also experienced in the Presbyterian Church (USA), which posted its lowest loss in decades (22,000) in 1998.
The UMC lost 38,477 U.S. members for the year ended Dec. 31, according to an unofficial tabulation by United Methodist News Service.
The UMC’s U.S. membership stands at 8.4 million. Definitive figures will be provided this fall by the churchwide General Council on Finance and Administration (GCFA). The PCUSA has a membership slightly over 2.5 million.
Membership figures have been sliding ever since the creation of the United Methodist Church in 1968, when the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren denominations merged. At that point, membership was 11 million. Despite the U.S. trend, the church rolls are growing elsewhere in the world, particularly in Africa and the Philippines. With 1.4 million members in those areas and Europe, the denomination’s total membership is about 9.9 million.
Presbyterian membership also began to decline sharply in the 1960s. In a little more than three decades, Presbyterian losses have totaled more than 1.5 million, nearly 40 percent of the total.
The most recent drop in U.S. membership in the UMC amounts to a 0.46 percent decrease. It follows a loss of 44,005 (0.52 percent) in 1997.