I've just returned from three days of the Bishop's Convocation of the Tennessee and Memphis Conferences of the United Methodist Church. The theme of the convocation was "Restoring Methodism." I'll not address the content of the convocation in this post except to note that the presenters, Professors James and Molly Scott, offered excellent ideas and processes for a potential restoration, if one is to be done. Their book and CD can be found here.
However, despite my enthusiasm for their ideas, I am pessimistic that anything can be done to reverse the decades-long downward trend in the number of people belonging to the UMC in the United States. (The UMC is a worldwide denomination and is growing outside the US.) In 1968 there were almost 13 million UMs; now there are about 8 million. Of these, we were told, the average age is 60. They didn't say what the median age is, but I expect it's higher. However, for this post I'll assume that the median age and the average age are about the same (as they are for UM's clergy). The median age for all Americans is 36.4 years (Census tables here).
What the convocation ignored was what the graying of the denomination portends. Once the mention was made of UMs' ages, the subject was dropped and we moved on to discussing how to fix the machinery of the denomination as a whole.
But having written a lot on my previous blog about Europe's demographic death spiral, I could not help but ponder whether United Methodism is in the same fix. The thrust of the convocation was that we UMs can reverse the decline if we return to Wesleyan basics. Now, I'm keen to return to Wesleyan basics and think we should do that anyway, but the idea that we can evangelize faster than the Grim Reaper reduces our numbers is a proposition that I find highly dubious.
Consider some actuarial facts. If indeed the median age is about the same as the average age, 60, that means that of the 8 million UMs living today, one-fourth, or 2 million, will be dead within 20 years, and another million dead about eight years later. So in less than 30 years, we will lose from death alone three-eighths of our present membership, leaving us at 5 million.
That decline does not include the hemorrhage of our youth who, when graduating from high school, graduate from the church as well (an issue affecting all denominations). I don't have the demographic breakdown for that age group as a percentage of the UM total, but the church admits that, relative to the general population, people under 35 are underrepresented.
So the decline due to death of our numbers will be amplified by dropouts, mostly, though not exclusively the under-35 cohort. There is only a small chance, IMO, that the number of people electing to leaved the denomination can be matched by those joining. But the idea that new members can offset losses from both dropouts and death is simply not supportable. If we could do that (or were willing to do it), we would already be doing it. And the losses from death in the coming years will only accelerate.
It goes without saying that with an average age of 60, United Methodists are generally no longer bearing children. Of course there are families in our churches, but there is a very large number of UM churches that have no children. The fertility rate among European-descended, American women is lower than the 2.1 replacement rate. The overall American fertility rate of 2.08 is that high only because non-white women are having more than two children each (on average, of course). See, "The vanishing American family."
This national trend is reflected in the UMC, so I think I stand on safe ground in saying that, on average, UM adults of childbearing age are not having enough children to replace themselves when they die, much less replace themselves and one or more older members.
But no one I know of in the Methodist church's hierarchy or think tanks is addressing this part of the issue.
We might also consider that the median age of UM elders (who serve as senior pastors of churches) is 52, which is my own age. The average age is almost 51. Of the 17,000-plus elders in the denomination, only about 840 are 35 or younger. As a rule, older clergy will not attract younger members, especially families. Furthermore, with a mandatory retirement age of 70.5, half of all elders will retire within 20 years (most clergy elect to retire before 70). So in addition to a shrinking membership, the UMC will be faced with a steadily graying clergy and an accelerating shortage to boot.
You're confusing things by talking about fertility rates; things change much more slowly there. For example, your 8 million Methodists, if they were reproducing with a (extremely low) fertility rate of 1.00, would run out of people after 23 generations. That's about 700 years. Despite all the hysteria about low birth rates among Europeans and white Americans, nothing's going to happen quickly, and the world will have changed radically several times by the time it could become a concern.
On the other hand, with a median age of 60, all the Methodists could be gone within a very short period. Bye.
I wonder if there isn't a bit of skew going on in your analysis due to the pattern of church-going by age. For example, in our church (a UMC congregation in NJ) we have LOTS of children up to the age of about 13 and their parents (ranging in age from 30-45). Then, of course, lots of seniors.
As in my case, I expect that a fair number of them will drop out as soon as their parents permit them to and then re-join when they have their own kids. Several people have even told me that their faith isn't particularly strong but that they are simply looking for a moral anchor for their children. So what happens when you take a population and simply carve out the entire demographic from 13-30? Well, unless there are huge numbers of children, you'll get a skew toward the older folks simply because the ages from 30 to 90 cover a much larger cohort (all other things being equal) than 0-12.
So, while agree with the proposition that the Church has to grow in order to live (hoping for stasis is not enough!) I would not be as quick to conclude that the UMC is doomed.
When I went to college, the one thing I noticed was how many people in my generation by and large ignored denominations and just went to non-denominational churches, or "Christian" churches. The main reason, not surprisingly, was they hated the politics of the churches their parents went to.
Wildmonk, the template you describe - drop out at 18 and rejoin at parenthood - is what I did. But the fact is that not everyone who drops out winds up returning to the church. I don't think even half do.
Rev. Sensing -
I will tell you that my experience with the UMC is not good. My wife was hired to start a 'Child Development Center' in an old UMC that is located near our local university. The pastor at that time was hoping to draw the school age type families and employees of the U to his congregation. BTW, my wife is expert at doing this and has run several for-profit and not-for-profit schools successfully from start-up levels.
First that pastor was replaced.
Next we got a political beast of a pastor who was more interested in smoozing the richest of the remaining congregation than increasing his membership. Rev C chased off Rev M who was LOVED by all in the congregation and drew more to her secondary services than the main Rev C ever could to his main Sunday service. This man was verbally abusive to my wife on more than one occasion. It was all she could do to keep me from facing him down, the impertinent little martinet. He also chased off the youth pastor who was GROWING the young membership of high school ages. Then my wife left the running of the center because she could take C no more. It is thankful that Rev C was promoted to Bishop C and taken away from the church.
The next pastor while a nice person is rather dull but at least he is not chasing off prospective members like C did. Yeah, I was going to join and the little crumb chased me off. I went elsewhere. Too bad because Rev M married my wife and I, helped bury my Mom, did the same for my Mom's neighbors mother and so many other good things.
The point is Rev, the UMC is doing this to itself as far as I can see.
The day care is still running and the church is surviving but not thriving.
From a Christian perspective, is a reduction in membership cause for concern? Old church members die; this is in some ways lamentable, but they (hopefully) benefit by this. As long as the lost are being reached, who cares how many people are in the pews? A church with 10 members who had previously not heard the gospel is better than one with a thousand members who would, otherwise, be Christians anyway.
I also wonder if it is true that older clergymen do not attract young people. Is there statistical backing for that idea? As a 24-year-old, I am glad to learn from those whose wisdom, experience, and spiritual growth outstrip my own.
Nathan, are you saying there is no relationship between the number of people attending church and the number of lost being reached?
Really?
The core issue is that people increasingly see mainline protestant denominations as out of touch. What is the point of going to a church that serves up lukewarm theology, and an emphasis on social gospel that makes many people of a different political leaning uncomforatable?
People don't want to invest their time and energy in a church that doesn't challenge them to deal with their sin. Look at the upswing in Orthodox church attendance. Evangelicals, particularly men, are flocking to the Orthodox church becasue of the vigor and spiritual discipline it involves. Additionally the megachruch phenomenon is providing people the means to hear the Word in a relevant way.
It's a problem that the mainline denominations are going to have to work hard to overcome. If you are a young family are you more likely to attend a church with an active and vibrant youth ministry, or a church where the majority of the congregation is in their 60's, and youth programs are an after thought?
Rev. Sensing,
It seems sad that the denominational authority has an apparent inability to see the problem coupled with an inability to do anything about it.
One comment of note: my own childhood church was a non-denominational church. One of the regular events at the church was the (adult) baptism of a recent convert who had grown up in a main-line denomination, fallen away, and been brought back to Christianity under the aegis of the non-denominational pattern of belief.
I was under the impression that this pattern has been in evidence in various non-denominational churches for at least a generation. (It may even have been spawned by the same cultural and religious forces that produced the 70's-era Jesus Movement.)
This is mostly anecdotal data, but it leads me to believe that the slow death you speak of for the United Methodist Church was not started recently. Its seeds quite probably were planted thirty or forty years ago.
The current situation (the average adult beyond child-bearing years, the average elder due to retire in two decades, the average family being below-replacement for itself, the small number of children of the church who remain or return, etc.) does look bleak. However, I doubt that it started in the past year--or even in the past decade.
Bob (#1) - can you explain your calculations? I think you've overlooked that demographers would not consider that all 8M UMs would reproduce at 1.0, or whatever number you wish to use. They use average births per woman, not per person. In other words, they don't count fathers in the calculation, only mothers. Now, I am positive that that there are more women than men among UMs, mainly because of widowhood but also because more men than women are dropouts.
The majority of women (probably the great majority) of the church are past childbearing age. But just to follow your line of thought, let's say that women account for 60 percent of all UM adults, and therefore there are 4.8 million women overall (8M * 0.6).
What would the time frame to disappear be then at 1.0 births per woman? I'm guessing a lot sooner than 700 years! Can you work that out and post it as a comment here?
The problem with the United Methodist Church is, IMO, multi-faceted. Like any organization in decline the finger cannot be pointed at one thing and no one fix will solve the problem.
Our clergy, Elder and otherwise, is aging with no real push by the denomination to reverse this trend. We have clergy who "retired" years ago still in the pulpit because there is no one else to fill it. I have no animosity toward elder Elders but they will eventually cease to be able to fill those postions. We make it increasingly difficult for those who are young to enter our pulpits. Many young preachers realize that going into debt for $100,000 to pay for school so that they can work in a $30,000 a year job that can move you at it's whim, doing so every 7 years on average, uprooting families from communities, spouses from careers and children from friends and schools is not that attractive an option. While I understand the need for itinerant clergy, I also think that the system could be better run (should you really make a move when neither the pastor nor the congregation wants it). Our Local Pastors who choose not to become Elders are treated a second class citizens within their Annual Conferences and on the General Conference level. We needs to rethink the way we recruit and retain our clergy (I know that there was a recent study on this but the results would make the problem worse instead of better).
The Methodist church is seen by many as the denomination who has no rules. We don't think anything is wrong or sinful. While this observation is not true it is the perception among many and until we return to strongly stating our values and holding our membership accountable this perception will continue. It doesn't help that some clergy who violate the Discipline go unpunished while others lose their jobs. When this happens in the public eye it confuses the perception of what we believe. If our belief have moved away from what the Discipline professes, change the Discipline.
The church has moved away from it's mission based attitude here in the US and in Europe as well. We have , at best, evangelism programs based on a "come and see" mentality. Didn't Jesus stress a "go and tell" type of evangelism?
These are the BIG problems IMO within United Methodism, there are many more but unless we fix these we will continue to decline.
Well, jeez, it's just 8th grade arithmetic:
(log(4.8E6)/log(2))*30
Just give that to Google, and it'll give you 666 years. An interesting result.
My point is that things based on birth rate happen very slowly; the basic unit of time is an entire generation, 30 years or so. Even at an average birthrate of 1.0 children per woman, less than half the replacement rate, it takes centuries to reduce the population significantly. On the other hand, if your entire population is beyond child-bearing age and there's no new blood coming in from outside, you'll all be gone in less than a century. That's what happened to the Shakers and the Skoptzys.
Define "significantly".
And a question for the Donald: Donald Sensing, if the American Methodist population halves each thirty years for a hundred and fifty years, that is not quite enough to round up to "centuries", and then something good happens and population decline ends, in your opinion is the alteration of the American Methodist population size significant or insignificant?
For everyone: at what point would you say that something significant was happening with this population, that it was not stable?
Start with 8 million American Methodists
1st 30 year halving: 4 million
2nd 30 year halving: 2 million
3rd 30 year halving: 1 million
4th 30 year halving: 500,000
5th 30 year halving: 250,000
Bonus question: is there a point where you would say that nothing of further significance was happening with this population?
Even at an average birthrate of 1.0 children per woman, less than half the replacement rate, it takes centuries to reduce the population significantly.
I'd consider a reduction of more than 50% in one generation significant.
How about we pull 2/3 of our troops out of iraq this year, that wouldn't be a significant reduction, right?
David Blue, your rhetorical point is well taken, but a birth rate of 1.0 does not halve the population in one generation because it takes longer than that for half the population to die. If, as Bob Munck has done, we define a generation as 30 years (which I think is too long, but let it pass), then half the >60 years old population of 4M, will die in the next 20 years and another 1M before the 30th year is reached. While that constitutes a 3/8 reduction of number by death, the UMC will not thereby decline from 8M to 5M because babies are being born into the church while the elderly are dying, just not enough born to replace all the people who die.
So if of the 8M present members, 4.8M are women, and of them a third are of childbearing age, then (again following B. Munck's number), then 1.6M women will have one child each. But only 95 percent of them will survive to adulthood (which is why it requires 2.1 birth to stay stable), so while 3M >60 folks are dying off, there will be just over 1.5M new Methodists being born. (At least we hope they'll stay Methodist!)
So over the next 30 years we'll lose 3M to death but gain half that number to births. (This assumes that there really are 1.6M women of childbearing age in the UMC, which is just an illustrative number. I have no idea what the real number is.)
Net loss in 30 years: 1.5 million.
Can we evangelize 1.5M people into the church in 30 years? Yes, we can, but to do that we will have to radically change our church culture and do so quickly. I am highly skeptical that we will do so.
Besides, of those 1.5M new Methodists, we will actually lose at least half within that 30-year period, making the actual net loss 2.25 million.
And even that may be too low a figure when it comes to pass. In the last 39 years we lost 4 million from all causes: death, dropouts, declining births and failure to evangelize.
So while Bob Munck's logarithms may be mathematically correct, they fail to model what is actually happening. And yes, David, you are right: to decline by one-third in only 40 years truly is "significant" and to decline by about another fourth over the next 30 years is, too. And logarithms can't fix that.
That effect goes away over the long term. During the (n+4)th generation, it doesn't matter in the least that members of the (n)th generation actually lived for 40-60 years after creating the (n+1)st; they're all gone now. The only thing this does to the total span is to lengthen it by however long the very last survivor lives. No big deal. (Of course, he'll have the company of the two members of the penultimate generation for part of that time.)
I don't know, that's what I was taught in sociology many years ago. And the professor, Jim Sakoda, was an expert on population dynamics (and origami). If you can establish that the average age of the mother when the average member of the population is born is less than 30, go for it. Won't make much difference.
Well of course they don't. You'd have to make all kinds of assumptions that aren't true-to-fact, such as that all Methodists are born of Methodists and that all those born of Methodists are Methodists. Both of those are challenged by the fact that kids just naturally rebel against their parents. My original point was about the populations of countries.
It's pretty well established that when a system is stressed, its components weaken at the center and strengthen at the extremities. For example, our political system as a whole and the parties within it are moving away from centralist positions and into more extreme ones in all directions. Likewise you'd expect the more bland, middle-of-the-road sects -- Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians -- to dwindle away and the more extreme ones -- Baptists, Mormons, Scientologists, Catholics -- to grow.
Catholics are extremists? Huh?
Is there some sort of plausible argument that cathoics aren't extremists?
Won't work - burden of proof's on you.
"I'm rubber, you're glue"?
I thought people got over that when they got out of grade school.
Wasn't this your original point?
Your point dismissed concerns as "hysteria", and said that "nothing's going to happen quickly" whereas a lot has already happened
You also rhetorically put off the day to worry about till the population completely ran out of people, which however comes at the end of a span of many notional generations before that consisting of two Methodists, four, eight and so on. (Counting backwards from the last Methodist.)
Post 12 confirmed that you were dismissing concern, and again focusing on a span of centuries (during most of which tiny numbers of people would slowly be dwindling out) rather than on a population of not many millions losing millions of its small numbers right now:Your statement that "at an average birthrate of 1.0 children per woman, less than half the replacement rate, it takes centuries to reduce the population significantly" doesn't hold up unless you are using an extremely strange definition of "significant".
I've asked you what your definition of "significant" is. You haven't answered.
I like comment #16 from Donald Sensing very much. But you were right to say that the effect of older people living on long after their (potential) breeding years is gone goes away after a while.
However that cuts against your dismissal of Donald Sensing's rational concern. This should make it all the easier to say: yes what's happening is a big deal for that denomination.
Given the decades long trends, Donald Sensing has good reason to wonder if his denomination is in a demographic fix.