Church growth: Liberalism down; Fundamentalism up

While reported at the Religious News Service as well as the Baptist Press, the National Council of Churches website has more information. Churches (using the NCC's extremely loose definition of the word) that showed the most growth:

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church in America, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and – largest of all – the Roman Catholic Church.

The thing that marks all of them is the high stress on ritual and conformity to the teaching of that church. People want structure.

The Catholic Church remains the largest faith group in the U.S. with 67,259,768 members and a growth rate last year of 1.28 percent. The second largest denomination in the U.S. is still the Southern Baptist Convention with 16,439,603 members and a growth rate of 1.18 percent. The United Methodist Church is third largest with a reported membership of 8,251,175 and a growth rate of .002 percent.

The SBC's growth rate is just a little behind the RCC's. The Methodist Church has been sliding into liberalism for decades now, which would be why it's growth rate is so abysmal.

Churches that declined in membership in 2004 are the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 4,984,925 members, down 1.05 percent; the Presbyterian Church (USA), 3,241,309 members, down 4.87 percent; The Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod), 2,488,936 members, down .95 percent); American Baptist Churches in the USA, 1,433,075 members, down 3.45 percent; and the United Church of Christ, 1,296,652 members, down 2.58 percent.

All of them, denominations that court or embrace Liberal theology.

Why can't these people ever figure this out?

Posted by Danny Carlton at May 31, 2005 08:54 AM