US News & World Report’s Dan Gilgoff considers Episcopalians’ move to ordain gays and lesbians in light of the membership woes afflicting mainline denominations:
One big question these changes raise is whether they’ll affect the dramatic decline of membership in mainline churches. The U.S. churches experiencing growth right now—those in the evangelical, nondenominational, and Mormon traditions—condemn homosexuality.…
But the churches most open to homosexuality are shrinking fastest.
That’s true only if you aggregate mainliners vs. Evangelicals and others. Within the mainline, there’s not nearly so much of a straight (erm) line correlation.
The big losers among mainline denominations are United Methodists, who shed nearly 20% of their members between 1990 and 2008, according to the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). The Methodists do not ordain gays and lesbians. Presbyterians and Lutherans each lost about 5-6% of their members. Episcopalians went down 20% as well, but on a much lower scale than Methodists: in 1990, there were about 3 million Episcopalians in the US. In 2008, there were around 2.4 million. Not chump change, to be sure, but nothing like the staggering 3 million Methodists who disappeared in the same period.
And as Gilgoff himself points out, Catholics—hardly the most gay-friendly of traditions—have been hit hard, a trend that has been masked by Catholic immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, my own United Church of Christ actually grew between 1990 and 2008. True, we’re still miniscule according to ARIS, but it’s a trend nonetheless. Also growing: “New Religious Movements and Other Religions,” a category that includes Unitarian Universalists among other gay-friendly groups, and those claiming no religion, which we know from other research to be the most sympathetic to gays and lesbians. NRMs and the “Nones,” as they’re called, more than double their population, outpacing every other sector of the religious economy.
A better way to put it, then, might be: some churches open to homosexuality are shrinking. Others are not. And the people who really are growing are the ones who don’t hate teh gay at all.
Tags: aris, dan gilgoff, episcopal church, gay marriage, gay ordination, lgbt, same-sex marriage, us news and world report
Why would it be surprising that churches which appeal to the lowest common denominators, the fear and loathing of the other, would grow? The sectarian, purity-driven appeal has long captured the imagination of the religiously inclined American as observers from Weber to Adorno to Altmeyer have noted.
One group you missed was the MCC which sprang from nowhere to become a good sized denomination in its own right.
I'd have to check, but IIRC, the MCC is not typically counted among the mainline denominations. It's also a very small denomination. But good point.
Conservatives like to point to the so-called decline in affirming denominations, but that measure of truth has always seemed more American-consumerist than Christian to me. (And even there, a product's "market share" isn't an objective indicator of quality, or poetry would out-sell the National Enquirer.) Jesus never said that our faith was a popularity contest.
That said, what can denominations like the Episcopal Church do to reach out to more of those non-religious folks who've been turned off to Christianity? We need to do a better job articulating a robust Bible-based and Jesus-based worldview that is also affirming of gays and women. A lot of people have lost faith that this is possible, both inside and outside the churches.
You could be the fastest growing church in the world - doesn't mean what you are doing is correct or biblical.
You could be the most "correct" and "biblical" church in the world (whatever that means), but if you weren't making an impact on a sizeable surrounding community, that wouldn't really matter at all either, would it?
Our church has been growing steadily since the moment it became more open to GLBT persons twenty years ago. Most of our longterm members tie the turnaround of the congregation *directly* to that choice to be welcoming to GLBT folks.
As to the other comments, while MCC churches might not be considered "mainline," it might be interesting to consider their overall membership numbers, compared to the decline in mainline churches, since most MCC members grew up in mainline churches.
While many "open and affirming" churches are indeed growing, unfortunately the United Church of Christ as a whole has been in a steady decline since the late 80's, the UCC yearbook reporting a loss of over 300,000 members since 1990.
Just as grouping all mainline denominations together is misleading, I'll bet that looking at any one of them is still too broad. I know that within my own United Church of Christ there are individual congregations that are very open and affirming, and others that are not at all, and the same is true among Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, etc. I'd be interested to know if individual congregations who affirm people who are gay and lesbian in all areas of ministry are bucking the trend of mainline decline. As anecdotal evidence, I know that some of them are growing.
MCC is very much declining - partially due to very poor leadership over the last few years and partially due to the other options now available to LGBT Christians.
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