By Peter Smith, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Membership declines among Protestant denominations have become routine in recent decades, but for some, the news has been especially bleak lately.
For the third year in a row, the Presbyterian Church (USA) lost 5 percent of its members nationwide and more than 100 congregations to other denominations in 2014, according to newly released statistics from the denomination. In and around southwestern Pennsylvania, where Presbyterians are especially concentrated, presbyteries all experienced losses of various levels.
Church members now number just fewer than 1.7 million nationwide.
A main cause is the defection of congregations to smaller, more conservative Presbyterian denominations in reaction to Presbyterian Church (USA)’s decisions to begin ordaining gays in 2011 and to begin marrying same-sex couples in the past year.
But the membership losses span a half-century and are similar in other so-called mainline Protestant denominations with low birthrates, such as United Methodists, Episcopalians and Lutherans.
The United Methodist Church, which so far has resisted calls to ordain gays or marry same-sex couples, lost 5 percent of members between 2009 and 2013. The chairman of the United Methodists’ economic advisory committee told church leaders last month that the denomination needs to turn around such losses within 15 years before they become irreversible.
For Presbyterians, “Nobody can be happy to see the numbers continue to go down,” said the Rev. Sheldon Sorge, general minister of the Pittsburgh Presbytery, which lost 3 percent of members last year and stands at 30,614 members in Allegheny County.
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The title to this article could have been, “Reporter reports on causes of loss of membership of PCUSA, seemingly without ever speaking to even one person who had left, to ask why.” The PCUSA seems to be winning the public relations contest, perhaps because reporters’ contacts are apt to be PCUSA contacts. Maybe the other Presbyterian denominations and churches need to be reaching out to the media, to get their stories out, and in the process, perhaps to elicit support and gain more members.
In fact, a bit of public relations work might help to put an end to the church property disputes. If it became well known to all that the denomination was claiming to own an individual church’s property, when that church wanted to leave the denomination, without having contributed to that church property at any time or in any way, and the church wanted its property not to turn it into a bowling alley, but to continue as a church, but that it felt that it must leave the denomination because it could no longer abide changes that the denomination had itself made, and that the denomination’s ability to hold that property was solely due to an accident of the law in whichever state the church was located in, and that in other states the church could freely leave, taking its property, I suspect that the denomination could be shamed into letting the property go.
Good observation. If sites like ‘The Layman’ (and there are excellent orthodox Christian sites out there) don’t get attention in main stream/secular media, we’re losing the argument. I’m surprised to see excellent stories on conservative Christian sites which are listed on page 6 of Google search, (while Huffington Post is on page one at the top) or way down on search engines. This is a spiritual battle, but also a political/secular battle to save souls using secular institutions if necessary.
Most local Bodies of Christ tend to be very conservative–Most national church bodies tend to be liberal. People want to stick to the basics. We need to make sure that the Word of God is taught.