Decline art
Gallup recently reported that the percentage of U. S. Americans who are members of a church, mosque, synagogue or other religious institution has fallen below 50% for the first time in the 80-some years that Gallup has been tracking it. According to Gallup surveys, the downward trend in religious membership has been driven primarily by the increase in the number of Americans who do not identify as being connected to any particular religion and secondarily by a decrease in the number of religious Americans with membership in a specific congregation.
It is worth reflecting on membership trends in The United Methodist Church in the light of this news story and the large number of similar stories about the "rise of the nones" and decrease in US religiosity that have come out for a decade or more.
The United Methodist Church famously has been dropping in U. S. membership since the year it was created. This long-term trend has been the source of much hand-wringing and many schemes to reverse the downward trend in membership.
Most proposed plans to address U. S. UMC membership decline take what I would call an organizational approach to the problem of membership decline. The assume that the cause of decline is internal to the organization and thus can be solved by making changes to the organization.
The variety of proposed changes varies: Some involve bureaucratic retrenchment. Other solutions involve new programs to be adopted by U. S. congregations. Both strengthening and abolishing the church's teachings against homosexuality have been touted as ways to reverse membership decline. Focusing on organizational factors draws on the valid insight that there are choices organizations can make that impact their health, either positively and negatively.
But what all of these proposals miss is that UMC membership decline is not occurring in a vacuum. This organizational trend is part of a much larger cultural trend in the United States away from organized religion, especially Christianity.
That trend has affected almost all aspects of the U. S. religious landscape, cutting across race, class, and theological traditions. To be sure, there are variations in how significantly religious membership has declined according to race, politics, theological tradition, economic class, education, and other factors, but the trend everywhere has been downward. It is just a question of how much. Even the vaunted growth of evangelical Protestantism in the 1980s and '90s has stalled out in the past 20 years, and membership decline has impacted that sector of the religious economy too.
This does not mean that there is nothing denominations can do in the face of a cultural move away from Christianity. To be sure, there are denominational traditions that have managed to grow in membership within this overall current of decline. They tend to be small, relatively young, and conservative denominations, though small and young may be the most salient features. There are too few small, relatively young, and liberal denominations to make a fair comparison.
Still, I'm sure these counter examples of membership growth give those forming the Global Methodist Church some hope, and there is a chance that their U. S. membership will grow, at least in the short term. Unless something changes in U. S. culture as a whole, though, they will likely find it difficult to sustain membership growth in the United States a decade after their creation. And the remaining UMC will almost certainly continue to drop in U. S. membership.
That does not make organizational changes unimportant. Again, organizations can actually make choices that lead to greater or lesser health. Yet, U. S. Methodists (and U. S. Christians generally) are fooling themselves if they think that they can solve a cultural problem with organizational solutions. Such an approach is an example of what leadership expert Ron Heifetz refers to as a technical solution to an adaptive problem.
I don't know what the adaptive solution to the cultural problem of U. S. religious decline is. I wish I did. But I am sure that understanding the nature of the problem is the first step in finding the solution.
The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.