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Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s membership decline is its worst in decades

Posted on June 24, 2008 by Kendall Harmon

The Louisville-based Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) suffered its worst annual membership decline in decades last year. The denomination lost 57,572 members in 2007 and has 2,209,546 active and confirmed members, a drop of 2.5 percent compared to 2006.

It’s the denomination’s largest membership loss in terms of numbers since 1981 and the steepest percentage loss since 1974, when it fell 2.7 percent.

The decline continues a trend of more than four decades of losses since membership peaked at 4.25 million in the mid-1960s.

Read it all.

Posted in * Religion News & Commentary, Other Churches, Presbyterian

7 comments on “Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s membership decline is its worst in decades”

  1. KevinBabb says:
    June 24, 2008 at 5:41 am

    “I really do believe that the membership loss has caused us to ask different questions … that we wouldn’t have asked if we weren’t losing members,” she said.”

    Indeed, questions like, “How much can you get for office space in downtown Louisville?”

  2. Little Cabbage says:
    June 24, 2008 at 6:13 am

    They also have the strange situation TEC faces, there are many, many more people being ordained or who want to be ordained than the numbers in the pews justify.

    Of course, being in the clergy can be a very satisfying second career for those with $$$ from their first career and no kids at home to worry about educating, feeding, etc.

  3. Kevin Maney+ says:
    June 24, 2008 at 6:34 am

    When you morph the Good News into something it is not so that you no longer have it, it’s hard to get folks to come and stay.

  4. Jim the Puritan says:
    June 24, 2008 at 6:44 am

    Things like this may be part of the problem:

    Cross-less Christianity promoted

    By Parker T. Williamson
    Editor Emeritus
    The Layman
    Saturday, June 21, 2008

    Christ’s death on the cross has no place in authentic Christianity said Rita Nakashima Brock, a featured speaker at the Witherspoon Society’s pre-General Assembly gathering. Brock said that when church leaders in the 10th century began celebrating bread and wine communion, they instituted “ritualized murder, sacred murder … salvation that is achieved by violence.”

    Brock teaches theology in Berkley, Calif.

    Brock was welcomed to the platform by Eugene T’Selle, a professor at Vanderbuilt Divinity School and founding leader of the Witherspoon Society. Appealing largely to Presbyterian Church (USA) seminarians and academics, the Witherspoon Society lobbies denominational assemblies on behalf of “progressive theology.”

    Acclaimed by the Society’s president Jane Hanna, as “the very model of an engaged theologian,” Brock has been an outspoken opponent of the Iraq war and has organized demonstrations outside President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch.

    According to Brock, a Re-Imagining God speaker who has been featured at several Presbyterian Church (USA) sponsored events, the idea of the atonement was a concoction of male church leaders to justify violence. According to Brock’s history, Jesus’ death as sacrifice for our sins was not a part of the early church’s teaching.

    Brock said that the early church was a here and now, “life affirming” community. It did not believe in a paradise that one enters upon death, but a paradise that one enters at the time of baptism. Paradise happens, said Brock, when we wake up to the presence of “The Spirit” in all of life and celebrate it.

    The early form of what the church now calls the eucharist was a celebration of life, not death, said Brock. Pointing to a painting of the last supper that she said was “very early,” Brock noted the presence of seven loaves on the table. The church was celebrating blessings, she said. It did not “go down the imperial toilet” until centuries later when it turned the feast into a ritual of sacrifice.

    Brock said that early church leaders celebrated creating, focusing primarily on the first three chapters of Genesis. The world, she said, is already a paradise, a place where humans may thrive. Brock believes that when a person understands what paradise really means, one is given power “to work for justice and to actualize the community of God in the world.”

    Why did male church leaders in the 10th century introduce the ideas of sin, guilt and the need for atonement? According to Brock, they did it in order to exercise power over people. Making people feel guilty and then offering them a release from that guilt is a form of manipulation and control, she said. The masses were duped into depending on church leaders and their sacrificial Jesus rituals.

    “Another Christianity is possible,” said Brock. “We already live on holy ground. It does not belong to any individual, not even to God … We actualize it when struggling for justice in community.”

    Following Brock’s presentation, the Rev. Noell Damico, a United Church of Christ minister who leads “the campaign for fair food,” applied Brock’s call to struggle for justice to support for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida.

    Damico thanked Presbyterian Church (USA) officials for their boycotts against Yum Foods which, she said, brought the corporation to the negotiating table and resulted in higher wages for Florida tomato pickers.

    “Slavery in US agriculture is alive,” she said. “It is here. You see slavery in industries where workers do not have the protection that other workers have. The going rate for a human is about $1,200 [the cost of importing an undocumented alien] right now.”

    Damico called on Presbyterians to continue their fight along side, not in behalf of, the Immokalee Coalition. “This is their struggle,” she said. “Justice will happen when the workers and the corporations sit at the negotiating table as equals.” Presbyterians must work to help that happen, she said. “We should not fall to the temptation to represent the workers, for they can speak for themselves.” The task of the church, said Damico, is to empower them.

    http://layman.org/

  5. robroy says:
    June 24, 2008 at 8:30 am

    And to think that the TEO was the fastest declining denomination.

  6. Jeffersonian says:
    June 24, 2008 at 8:39 am

    But how is this possible…haven’t they watered down the theology until it makes an episode of “Teletubbies” seem like “King Lear?” Haven’t they done away with all that virgin-birth-die-for-your-sins-raised-from-the-grave gobbledegook to be less squaresville and more inclusive…Jesus as kind of a matzoh-flavored Leo Buscaglia? And haven’t they embraced teh ghey?

  7. IchabodKunkleberry says:
    June 24, 2008 at 8:20 pm

    Didn’t Flannery O’Connor’s novel “Wise Blood” have a character in it
    who preached for his “Church Without Christ” ? Same thing here,
    isn’t it ?