Crunching the numbers
Thursday, January 22, 2009
At times, it seems like the United Methodist Church has a 'numbers obsession.' The statistics are familiar: when the church was formed in 1968, it had well over 10 million members in the U.S.. Today, just 40 years later, the numbers have dropped to below 8 million - all in a time when the population of the United States itself has risen from 200 million to over 300 million people.That's right. While the population of the country has risen by 50%, the membership of the church has dropped by 20%. By any measure, that is a failure.
But what does it mean?
In the past, I have written disparagingly about the church's obsession with numbers. I've never had a problem with focusing on thriving, growing churches. I've just worried that an obsession with numbers would lead us to offering cheap grace, with an over-attention to adding warm bodies to the pews while watering down the gospel in order to get them there.
The Igniting Ministry campaign has always seemed to confirm that fear to me; its intent is to market the church - to 'raise awareness' and hopefully increase numbers - but it does so by offering a message so nebulous that it is essentially meaningless: "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors." (I know and have read about the work Igniting Ministry does with target congregations and the training they have received, but that is a relatively small part of the way the campaign has affected the whole church. It is bad theology, and - I can't say this strongly enough - it is a crying shame that we have spent so much money on advertising that does not mention the name of Jesus Christ, all in the name of being sensitive to "spiritual seekers." I have no doubt that John Wesley does somersaults in his grave over this.)
Today I want to offer a mea culpa. I believe numbers are important, and I believe we need to focus on them. Two things have caused me to change my tune and openly embrace a focus on numerical growth in the church.
The first is that I've come to believe we have nothing to fear from the watered down message of marketing programs like Igniting Ministry. They don't work. Igniting Ministry has been around for years, and its results are as hollow as its message. UM Communications can offer press releases every time a new Barna study says that Igniting Ministry has increased the 'favorability' of the United Methodist 'brand' in the public at large, but that has done nothing to arrest our precipitous decline in numbers. Thus, I can only conclude that my fears about cheap grace were wrong. In our cultural climate, apparently even cheap grace doesn't draw a crowd.
The second point is really more important, and it's the subject of my new column in the United Methodist Reporter. In December, I was with Wesley Seminary's Lovett Weems at a conference in Washington D.C., and he presented on the importance of pastors and congregations that are serious about their numerical growth. The core of Lovett's message to us that day can be found in this article. It really boils down to this: Jesus called us to make disciples, and the church in Acts exhibited remarkable growth by boldly proclaiming the gospel of Christ. As the inheritors of that apostolic ministry, we are called to do the same.
I've got to admit that this has really shaped my thinking about my own ministry. The testimony of the Scripture is that, when the true gospel is proclaimed, people will respond.
Might this be a litmus test for faithful ministry?
Labels: Church Statistics, Clergy, Igniting Ministry, Lovett Weems, UMC
posted by Andrew C. Thompson at 10:32 PM
10 Comments:
Andrew,
I would encourage you to look a little further back. It seems that after some research (and I wish I had the paper at hand to quote the references given) a person wrote a paper that came into my hands, which tells the story of how the decline of the Methodist Church began back in 1953. 1951 was the height of membership and attendance in the church.
It leads me to wonder just how much of the drop in 10 million to 8 million was really happening before 1968, and we are just beginning to catch up with the cleaning up of rolls.
Andrew, I agree with with your thoughts regarding Igniting Ministry, as well the importance of numbers, especially having accurate numbers. I followed a pastor once who had had taken some people through training in Igniting Ministry - they even had some plaque recognizing the level of training they had done - and still he lied drastically about the strength of the worship attendance in the church and refused to clean up the membership records. . . maybe he was trying to give the appearance that Igniting Ministry was helping that congregation.
Except for my first part-time appointment as a local pastor, every other congregation I have served has had pretty inflated membership numbers (I mean no one had cleaned them up in a long time). In my last appointment (the one mentioned above), we removed 100 members from the rolls in a single charge conference (in a church with average attendance of about 110 people). I understand that is a particular problem in the UMC in the south, but was surprised by it here in the midwest. It makes me really wonder how accurate our aggregate number for membership really is for the whole denomination.
In my experience, the average church probably reports membership of 10% greater than what is really appropriate, if not higher. If that really is true, then our membership is much closer 7 million than 8. Since I read recently that UM attendance is around 3 million, it makes a lot of sense that membership be around 7 million.
Lars, unless your last remark in the comment is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, I really have an issue with that. It depends, I guess, on what is meant by "attendance" and how frequent one has to attend to be considered in that stat, but I remember vowing something about "presence" when joining the UM Church. By which standard would Wesley, who found nominal Christianity repugnant, calculate membership.
I find it fascinating that many mainlines have overwhelmingly higher membership rolls than attendance yet many so-called "non-denominational" congregations typically have twice as many (or more) regular attenders than members.
As you know from our personal conversations, Andrew, I, too, have had to rethink my antagonism toward "numbers." So, apparently, has Bishop Will Willimon. Listen to his podcast and he spells it out explicitly: focus on the numbers or die.
Here's my personal challenge for you: start pitching in this Duke circles and report back to me. My suspicion is that those insulated from local churches hemorrhaging disciples will look at you like you're from the sticks and have learned nothing while at Duke. Go on, give it a whirl...
Also, this almost goes without saying, but getting pastors who can lead churches to numerically grow is difficult for several reasons.
1. Seminaries and divinity schools don't train them to do this.
2. Many pastors have come into the ministry under the assumption that pastoring a local church is more akin to chaplaincy than to leading a mission outpost.
3. Some (many?) lay people resist the very shift in pastoral responsibilities required to lead a church toward numerical growth. I have found that some people get really unnerved if I'm not in my office (under their thumb?) for 12+ hours a week. Never mind that they don't every come into the office. But I should be there because that's what pastors do. Just like Jesus who always hung out in office.
Apparently, the decline really accelerated over the last 20 years. When I visted the NCC at 475 Riverside Drive, Manhattan (aka 'The God Box')in 1990, one of the UMC officials there told me that the number was "just under ten million." Those were his exact words. I still remember.
Numbers are tough. They're blunt instruments. They can make us look good, or look bad. They're easily created out of thin air (as some commentators have observed).
When I first got to this small town church I challenged the people to build attendance to 200 - something that hadn't happened since the mid 1960s (it had been 135 average). We made it after three years. Since then, we've been pretty much plateaued there.
Here's what I did to build attendance:
1. I kept the people informed on where we were in our quest.
2. I talk more about attendance than membership, telling them that one sign of a healthy church is having more people in attendance than in membership, since healthy churches are attracting people curious about Jesus.
3. I was stubborn.
4. I told people there were two ways to build attendance: (a) People who already come coming more often; (b) New people coming.
5. I built relationships with the members & visitors who came, constantly challenging them to invite others.
I wouldn't be big on numbers but numbers represent people.
Jeffrey Rudy - I was not intentionlly being tongue-in-cheek. I recently saw that in an average week in the US, there are about 3.2 or 3.3 million United Methodists who attend church. Upon searching for it again, all I could find was the 2002 number, which was 3.4 or 3.5 million per week. Ever since I entered ministry, I have been told that for Protestants in general, including United Methodists, having half of your membership show up for worship was about average, and anything better than that was considered doing pretty well. If that rule of thumb is still true, then double our average attendance would be a rough approximation of our membership. Double 3.3 million is actually less than 7 million, but I was giving the benefit of the doubt. Anyways, the point is our actual membership, I believe, is well less than 8 million, based on weekly attendance data.
I feel strongly that membership and attendance SHOULD correlate more strongly, but in most of my experience, they simply do not.
Numbers are important in the minds of officials, but numbers can't finally motivate laity or clergy. Otherwise you end up with something like Igniting, which really isn't all bad.
That's a metaphor for the UMC- always thinking a program will fix something, if not Igniting then something else. What happened that you're so angry about Igniting anyway?
The Acts narrative is not normative- it's descriptive of what was happening as a result of the quality of life shared, community over and against empire. So when we point to Acts as what we should be, it's not about the numbers, but the mission and movement of God across cultures. UMC's continue to be a keeper of the status quo when it comes to 11 AM Sundays being the most segregated hour in America.
Most UMC execs like Weems are looking at the effect, the result, not the movement that gets us to better numbers. Tell us something we don't already know! They can't because there is no silver bullet in terms of more stuff to do.
Scott - Thanks for your comments. FYI, my opposition to Igniting Ministry is primarily theological in nature. As the 'face' of the church to the broader society (at least in terms of media advertising), it does not accurately or adequately represent a Wesleyan understanding of the call of the gospel on our lives. I wrote a UM Reporter column about this sometime ago, which you can find here:
http://www.umportal.org/article.asp?id=2309
So I'm not angry, just in disagreement.
Peace,
Andrew
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