Rev. Dr. David B. Lindsey serves as the Executive Director of Interfaith Action for Human Rights, a multi-faith non-profit dedicated to criminal justice reform in Virginia, Maryland, and DC. In addition to his previous leadership at the Interfaith Council for Metropolitan Washington, Rev. Lindsey has served local UCC churches in Southern California, Minnesota, and Northern Virginia.”
Rev. Dr. Jim Keck of First-Plymouth UCC in Lincoln, Nebraska recently posted some statistics on social media that got me thinking about growth, decline, and vitality in congregations:
“First-Plymouth is now 4,000 members. But it was far larger when it had 25 members. Let me explain. One way to measure the size of a church is by percentage of the population. So the day we were founded in the year 1866 our 25 members represented 5 percent of the town’s population (500). In 1935 we had two thousand members and that had shrunk to two and a half percent of the growing town’s population (80k). Today we are only a little more than one percent of Lincoln’s population.”
Cautioning that he was having fun with numbers, Rev. Dr. Keck closed his post by writing that “the key mission is to grow in love not the percentage of population.”
Rev. Dr. Keck’s admonition to grow in love is one that we all share in the Church Universal, yet it is rarely the means by which we actually measure growth, decline, and vitality. To be frank, it’s harder to measure the growth of God’s love in people’s hearts than it is to count heads in a pew, numbers on a membership role, or how many congregations opened or closed in a year. And in a capitalist economy such as ours in the United States, we in the American church sometimes treat dollars and cents as the ultimate arbiter of vitality. This may not be conscious, but it still happens. After all, how often have you attended a church meeting at which the Treasurer said, “Donations keep declining, and we’re doing great”?
As a result, we in the United Church of Christ (like many denominations) often fall into a spiral of despair when we see numbers like those in our recent annual report about the state of the church (available here). Membership continues its decades-long decline, and the number of congregations in the UCC keeps declining, as well. But after looking closely at those numbers, I noticed a trend that I wanted to highlight for further reflection. As seen in the two charts below, the rate at which the number of UCC members has declined is different than that of the number of UCC congregations:
The overall rate of decline in membership numbers relative to the number of congregations suggests to me that the average membership in a given congregation is declining faster than our congregations are closing. This suggests that we have an increasing number of smaller congregations that can no longer afford full-time clergy, as well as multi-staff congregations that are becoming solo pastorates. At the same time, our context for ministry is a nation whose population continues to grow over time.
This could be bad news, but remember what Rev. Dr. Keck said: the key mission is to grow in love, not the percentage of the population. I doubt there is a clergyperson in the UCC who would honestly claim that the size of a congregation’s membership is directly correlated to the health of the congregation. Vital congregations exist in many sizes, and vital church members exist in congregations of every size. So while we continue to measure the numbers of members and churches, how do we also measure the growth of love over time? Could it be that we need to reframe how we view statistics and measurement in order to actually get at what the Holy Spirit is doing in our midst?
The Epistle of James claims that “faith without works is dead,” suggesting that growth in God’s love by definition leads to action that impacts the world. Said another way, a vital church is one that seeks to make positive social change in and among its community. If that’s true, then perhaps we would do well to consider Alnoor Ebrahim’s research on measuring social change in the world. He’s published loads of research about this (including a book on the matter), and you can watch an interview with him here.
Could we apply Ebrahim’s methods to measuring vitality in the UCC? What could that do? Could we actually find ways to more fully understand the ways in which we as the UCC are changing the world for the better? And if we find that we aren’t, could we be honest enough with ourselves and pivot to do better?
Vital Signs and Statistics 