By Larry Brown, The Aquila Report
I have just read where the Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA) lost 102,791members for the year ending December 31, 2012. This is a more than 5% decrease from the previous year, and the biggest decline since the Presbyterian Church US (PCUS) and the United Presbyterian Church USA (UPC, USA) merged thirty years ago in 1983. The membership of this denomination, which stood at 3,131,228 at the time of the merger, now stands at 1,849,496, or a 41% drop in its thirty years of existence. The antecedent denominations to today’s PCUSA peaked in 1965 with 4,254,597 making the losses suffered since then a whopping 56% drop. This is not a decline; words like “disaster,” “exodus,” and “nosedive” come to mind.
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The author makes an important point: It’s not just the PCUSA that is declining in numbers, but the net total of all the Presbyterian denominations (and other mainline denominations). Right, now, EPC and ECO are growing at the expense of the PCUSA, as PCA once did. But when the outflow of conservatives from PCUSA inevitably plays out more or less to an end point, and a sort of equilibrium is reached among the Presbyterian denominations, they will all still face other forces that will continue the downward pressure on their membership numbers.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but to my knowledge the PCA has been showing slow but steady growth year by year, long after the period that PC(USA) congregations would be expected to switch to that denomination. It remains to be seen if the EPC and ECO continue to grow after the rush of congregations to them subsides.
The PCA posted its first membership loss in 2009 (http://layman.wpengine.com/newsbe66/), but it gained members the next year (http://layman.wpengine.com/Files/Actions%20of%20the%2038th%20General%20Assembly%20PDF.pdf). I was unable to find reference to membership gains or losses in 2011, and the 2012 membership statistics will probably not be released until the GA next week.