Ryan Burge, a demographer with the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, does the most careful tracking of mainline Protestant denominations of anyone in the field. This week he took a look at my own denomination, the United Church of Christ. Formed by the merger of two denominations in 1957, the UCC has been in uninterrupted decline for over six decades.
“The UCC,” Burge notes at the onset, “is a really interesting denomination because it was once a genuine powerhouse in American Protestantism.” The UCC was formed in 1957 through a merger of two older traditions — the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church.
“Congregationalism mattered a lot in early American history. In The American Religious Landscape, I write that “Congregationalists likely represented the single largest religious tradition during the Revolutionary era.” Burge reports a story of steep decline, which while not unique to the UCC, may be among the worst of the 12 denominations grouped under the label “mainline.”
“Both congregations and membership have taken an absolute nosedive since the early days of the UCC,” writes Burge. “It’s pretty apparent that 1960 was the apex of the United Church of Christ, when they boasted about 2.25 million members and over 8,000 churches. From that point forward, decline was the norm. That’s something I want to make crystal clear here: the UCC has been moving in a downward direction for over six decades now.
“The most current data indicate that the number of congregations has dropped to 4,485. That’s a decline of about 46 percent. The most recent membership number for the United Church of Christ is 683,936, a dip of just under 70%. Just think about that for a moment. For every 10 UCC members in 1960, there are three today. Just staggering stuff.”
“And here’s what really should concern the leaders of the United Church of Christ — they are still losing about 15,000 members per year even as the denomination has slipped to fewer than 700,000 members…. When you see losses like that now, it amounts to a decline of about 2% per year.
“Beyond the straightforward analysis of membership decline, there’s another ‘flashing light’ in this data as well: the average UCC church is really small. According to their records, the median in-person worship attendance in 2023 was just 39 people per church, with a median membership of 97. Holy cow, that is incredibly problematic.”
“In 1995, just 28% of churches had fewer than 50 ‘butts in seats’ on an average weekend. That number actually stayed fairly consistent through 2005. But from that point forward, the ‘micro-church’ began to explode in the United Church of Christ. By 2015, almost half of all UCC congregations averaged fewer than 50 worshippers. In the most recent data from 2023, two in three congregations in the United Church of Christ had weekend attendance between 1 and 50 people.
“Here’s a statistic that I will keep in the back of my mind for a very long time: the share of congregations in the United Church of Christ that will have more than 150 people show up this Sunday is 3%. That’s 135 total congregations.”
As Burge notes none of this is new information. It’s been going on for a long time. What’s been done in response? Not much. Denominational leadership has met this reality with a combination of denial, wishful-thinking, doing what we’ve always done only more single-mindedly and even self-congratulation. An example of self-congratulation: “The reason we’re declining is because we have been so prophetic.”
While we had some good leaders into the 1990s I would say that since then those in denominational leadership have not been serious people. Most qualified as “peace-mongers,” who avoided hard issues and truth-telling, offering happy talk instead. My favorite happy talk line was, “The UCC is the best-kept secret in the world . . . if only people knew about us they would be flooding through our doors.”
Was this decline inevitable? I don’t think it was. I note that each of four UCC churches I served, between 1977 and 2004, grew in number of members, worship attendance, overall participation, and financial support during my tenure. In addition the last one I served saw a decline in the average age of members from 55 to 42 (don’t have that data set for the others). That congregation averaged 450 in worship attendance in the last seven years of my tenure. It was always a team effort of clergy, laity, and gifted staff members. Because in the last decade, so many of our churches have gotten so small and members so elderly, such vitality has gotten harder.
During 15 of those years I was part of a group of a dozen or so UCC clergy (male and female, gay and straight) that got together annually for mutual support. Most if not all of the churches led by pastors in the group were similarly healthy and growing. Members of that group had some things in common. We loved the Lord, loved the church, treasured the Scriptures, and didn’t think the main business of church was politics or the culture wars.
A big part of the decline owes to group-think taking over in the UCC, most especially inside the denomination’s national offices and leadership, but often in congregations as well. Viewpoint diversity was not welcomed. Which is particularly ironic as one of the points of pride of Congregationalists was our emphasis on the “freedom to walk according to the light which the Lord hath given you.” This was embodied by being a “non-creedal” church. You didn’t have to accept a creed (e.g. “Apostles,” “Nicene,” or any other) to belong.
And yet, in the last 50 years we did become, in a different way, a highly creedal church. That is, you had to adhere to a “creed” of certain political and social beliefs. Moreover, you had to hold theological convictions lightly, if at all. We became a kind of mono-culture, as unhealthy in churches as it is in nature.
In the recent book by the Brookings Institution scholar Jonathan Rauch, Crossed Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, Rauch says that most of the mainline can be described as “thin Christianity.” Faith isn’t deep or thick but thin.
Moreover, these churches came to be characterized, in Rauch’s words, by a cultural trade deficit. “The church is in cultural deficit — if it becomes a net importer of values from the secular world — then it becomes morally derivative rather than morally formative. Rather than shaping values, it merely reflects them, and thus melts into the society around it.” The UCC’s unceasing, un-questioned efforts to be “relevant” have in the end rendered us largely irrelevant.
Some of you will respond by saying, “But what about the other guys? (meaning the Religious Right or the new theocrats associated with MAGA). They are the real problem. Why are you picking on us?” To which I reply that there is something to be said for taking the log out of your own eye.
For those who ask “what should we do?” or “what should we have done?” I would suggest the two of my books which are the most pertinent, Transforming Congregational Culture and Changing the Conversation: A Third Way for Congregations, both published by Eerdmans.
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