Dear Reverend J. Herbert Nelson II, stated clerk of the General Assembly of the PCUSA,
I would be remiss not to begin this letter by thanking you for your service to God’s Kingdom and to the Presbyterian Church (USA). You are in a leadership position during a time of much transition and change. I lift you up in prayer as you navigate through the various challenges of your role.
Image 2: We are headed to a major leadership gap as our “net Minister” loss has seen a significant jump the last 5 years
I have felt the need to write to you after the publication of the 2016 Summaries of Statistics – Comparative Summaries, the press release on the church’s web site, and your own statement, ‘We are not dying. We are reforming.’
I am a long-standing member of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and for some time I have been troubled by the direction of the denomination. In many ways, I feel like a stranger within my own home. I continue to struggle, reflect and pray about my continued involvement with the church.
I have taken the 2016 Summaries of Statistics– Comparative Summaries report and looked at additional information going back to 2005. The data is striking, scary, saddening, and alarming. You state, “We are not dying. We are reforming.” Reforming to what?
I lead a sales team. My company is undergoing major changes as consumers switch from traditional “brick and mortar” purchases to buying products on-line. Like the Presbyterian Church membership, my company is seeing a declining retail customer base. As you have challenged the denomination to look to immigrants as full members of the Presbyterian Church, my company seeks to find new avenues to sell our products in different ways. However, just as importantly, a second focus of my company’s strategy is to make sure we are going above and beyond with customer service to keep our existing clients. With all due respect, I do not see the Presbyterian Church (USA) focusing on keeping existing membership.
In a review of the PCUSA data from 2005 to 2016 – looking at trends and not isolating a single year:
- Membership loss is accelerating, not as you state, “slowing down” [See the graphic at the top of the page.]
- We are headed to a major leadership gap as our “net Minister” loss has seen a significant jump the last 5 years [See Image 2]
- Our “Membership Gains” are decreasing at an increasing rate, endangering our future as we are headed to less than 10,000 people per year under the age of 17 added to the church [See Image 3]
Image 3: Our “Membership Gains” are decreasing at an increasing rate, endangering our future as we are headed to less than 10,000 people per year under the age of 17 added to the church
I have attached the details [graphics included in this post] to help provide additional context.
Reverend Nelson, I agree with you that our denomination needs adopt a strategy to reach out to all people around us and invite them into the church. However, equally and even more importantly, the PCUSA needs to develop a strategy to keep members. Until there are compelling reasons why individuals should express their faith in God through Presbyterian polity, we will continue to witness this exodus. You may be able to tout a year here or a year there showing a slowdown in membership decline, but that will be tied to less people to count, not a change in the underlying movements.
At my employer, we are “reaching forward” – seeking new companies to partner with and to service. At the same time, we are also “reaching back” – engaging those customers who have left, seeking the meaning of their departure and inviting them back to participate with our products.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) needs to do some serious “reaching back” to understand why people have left and to better understand how keep congregants and to introduce new members to the rich and unique history of the PCUSA.
Again, thank you for your leadership and many Blessings,
David Buck
Elder, First Presbyterian Church
Springdale, AR
7 Comments. Leave new
Amen, brother. You are totally on point. This reminds me of when a friend of mine quoted her dad years ago. He worked for the film studios and one of the new offshoots of a major company had just come in. Their goal was to get rid of what had inspired generations of people to love this major studio – no more of this sweet stuff or happy endings that had made the studio what it was. They were going to remake the new films coming out of the studio into something more “meaningful.” It didn’t happen – fortunately – but the attitude and the intentions were there. See the similarities?
Dear Elder Buck: With respect, I think your advice to Mr Nelson may be unrealistic. Reaching back? My experience is that mainline Protestantism is a place where mistakes are not admitted and where accountability for poor decisions is absent; where architects and advocates of past bad decision draw nice pensions (or, if dead, are honored as visionary heroes). Ironically, Mr Nelson’s characterization of the ongoing shrinkage as ‘reformation’ may be accurate: when the PCUSA closes down and its members disperse to more traditional-belief churches, then reformation (in terms of traditional belief) will have been advanced.
When you have a co-moderator who equates evangelicals with terrorist, and the things coming out of the louisville sluggers theses days sounds more like democratic talking points than out of the Bible, it’s not hard to see why the pcusa is dying on the vine, at the same time when other evangelicals churches are growing. It’s not hard math.
Meanwhile, the PCA continues to grow…go figure.
The key to true “reformation” in the PCUSA is the return of true sovereignty to the people for the denomination. This can be accomplished though 5 steps or actions.
-1. Repeal/removal of the Property in Trust clause. This would allow the free movement and association of churches, clergy and people to where they should be, need to be, and would do much to promote healing and reconciliation.
-2. Repeal/removal of Per Capita. Replace with a voluntary 1-2% assessment of church budget for denominational administrative purposes.
-3. Reduce the administrative bloat and footprint of the 177 Presbytery/15 Synod/PMA-OGA structure into a far more lean, more cost effective regional units. This would require mergers and consolidations across the board
-4. Reduce the power and influence of the various special interest tribal/identity groups that currently run the PCUSA and poison any discourse by their hyper partisanship and victimization agendas.
5. Finally get the Board of Pensions out of partisan politics by the ending of using its reserve funds as a tool for the activist Left to make policy by other means. Policies which the stake holders never agreed too or voted. Also get the Board of Pensions out of the Health Care business by allowing churches and employing organizations to buy the insurance that best meets their clients at far less than the current confiscatory 25%+ of effective salaries .
Now if you gave the PCUSA a free and clear choice of any of these ideas or death, they would choose death of course. Their pride, hubris, egos would allow them no other choice. Death it is.
I rate Nelson’s analysis of the PCUSA’s “reformation” a full-fledged 8 on the 10-point Guffaw Scale. Mr. Gregory has some real suggestions for genuine redirection of the denomination, especially Item #5!
Sorry, Mr. Buck, the PC(USA) died spiritually years ago. They have rejected the Word of God, both written and Incarnate. They have violated Christ’s admonition in Matthew 18:6 by telling LGBTQ persons that homosexual relationships are not sinful and committed their latest heresy by approving same sex marriage.