Analysts See Evangelical Growth, Catholic Strength in 1990s : Trends: The pattern of the last decade is likely to continue. No turnaround is expected in mainline denominations’ slide.

What’s ahead for American churches in the 1990s?

The evangelical churches will sustain their pattern of growth from the past decade and the old-line denominational slump will continue, church analysts say.

And if there’s going to be any “Establishment” faith for the 1990s, it is likely to be Roman Catholicism, which has grown a solid 16% in the United States during the past 20 years.

“The Catholics,” says Richard Mouw of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, “are the calm, dignified, authoritative voices, insofar as there are any at all.”

The umbrella group known as evangelicals includes fundamentalists, charismatics and Pentecostals. The rapidly growing Assemblies of God--the largest Pentecostal group in the United States--has quadrupled from just over half a million members in 1965 to more than 2 million now.

Meanwhile, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, has climbed steadily during the period by more than 4 million to its present 14.8 million members.

On the other hand, church watchers expect no quick turnaround to the chronic slide in both numbers and social influence experienced by mainline denominations during the past 25 years.

“Liberal Protestantism is unlikely to regain the dominant cultural position it once enjoyed,” researchers Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney note in a major study of American Establishment religion.

In 1965, when eight of the largest mainline Protestant denominations were close to the zenith of their growth, they had a combined membership of 30.8 million. In 1987, the most recent year that complete information for these churches is available, the total was 25.1 million, a decline of 18.5%.

Thus, the old-line denominations--such as Presbyterian, Episcopal, United Church of Christ and Methodist--have shifted from the “mainline” to the “sideline.” As McKinney put it: “They no longer own the stadium.”

The current struggles of the National Council of Churches illustrate both the persistent problems of interchurch cooperation and the long-term decline of the Protestant denominations that have traditionally formed the council’s bulwark.

The council, the nation’s largest interfaith organization, loosely represents 32 Christian denominations with a combined membership of 42 million. But at a pivotal board meeting in Lexington, Ky., last May, it became evident that internal divisions, shrinking budgets and declining power could threaten the body’s very existence in the 1990s.

Roof and McKinney also argue that members of mainline liberal churches tend to have fewer children. Thus, “the natural growth potential for the liberal denominations is fairly weak, while the opposite is true for conservative bodies.”

The most recent survey of the nation’s 500 fastest-growing Protestant churches lends support to that observation: Researcher John Vaughan of Southwest Baptist University found that 89% were evangelical, non-mainline congregations.

The “higher-octane religions” will be the growth leaders in the 1990s, according to Rodney Stark, professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington.

“As long as churches are relatively more evangelical or orthodox, ask a little more of members, prohibit a little more of members, they grow,” said Stark, author of a book on the churching of America from 1776 to 1990.

The predominantly black Baptist and Pentecostal denominations such as the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., and the Church of God in Christ are expected to extend their growth during the 1990s, spurred by high birth rates, strong communal bonds and the black churches’ tenacious commitment to civil rights concerns.

But the old-line denominations are not down for the count just yet.

According to Roof and McKinney, the liberal church is “an amazingly resilient institution (with) a residual capacity to provide a vocabulary of symbols, beliefs, moral values, and feeling responses for articulating a socially responsible individualism.”

Roof and McKinney also maintain that the Catholic Church is “in the best position ever to assume a custodial role for American culture at large.”

Catholicism is the wave of the future, these analysts say, because immigration is changing the cultural face of the church as millions of Latin American and Asian Pacific peoples migrate to the United States. Already, perhaps as many as a third of the nation’s 55 million Roman Catholics are Latinos; that proportion is expected to top 50% before the end of the coming decade.

African-style liturgy and concerns of black Catholics are also on center stage. Last summer, Father George A. Stallings Jr., a black priest, formed a separatist African-American Catholic church in Washington that has since grown to three congregations.

Although Stallings’ priestly functions were officially suspended by Cardinal James Hickey, the topic of institutional racism in the church is likely to be prominent at meetings of black Catholics and on the agenda of the national church for years to come.

Also confronting American Catholicism in the 1990s will be the continuing--and worsening--shortage of priests.

By the year 2000, according to surveys made by the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, the projected decline from resignations, deaths and fewer ordinations will leave 15,000 active parish priests--fewer than half as many as in 1966--to serve an estimated 65 million U.S. Catholics.

Jeffrey Hadden, an expert on the sociology of religion, said he believes continuing conflict within American Catholicism will stem from Pope John Paul II’s desire to replace liberal U.S. clergy with conservatives.

Tensions between liberals in the U.S. hierarchy and Rome reached crisis proportions during 1986 after the Vatican disciplined Seattle Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen for his apparent laxity in pastoral administration--a situation that many of the bishops thought could have been resolved without Vatican intervention.

Consolidation of urban parishes is inevitable during the 1990s as more and more of the 180 U.S. Catholic dioceses have priestless parishes. One of 10 U.S. parishes already has no regular priest.

Non-ordained parish managers are increasingly presiding over business and administrative tasks once performed only by priests. In the future, these lay administrators may exert combined leadership over three or four parishes, both priestless and staffed, church planners say.

RISING AND FALLING CHURCH MEMBERSHIPS

Many of the mainline Protestant churches have been losing members in great numbers during the last 25 years while the more conservative denominations, such as the Assemblies of God and Southern Baptist Convention, have been growing. At the same time, the Mormon and Roman Catholic churches have been increasing.

The churches listed below that have been decreasing in membership dropped a total of 18.5% from 1965 to 1987, down from 30.8 million to 25.1 million. During the same period, the total membership of selected growing church bodies rose by 25%, from 59.4 million to 74.4 million.

Membership of selected major U.S. churches, in millions:

DECREASING 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 American Lutheran Church 2.541 2.543 2.416 2.353 2.332 Lutheran Church America 3.143 3.107 2.986 2.923 2.898 Evang.Luth. Church America -- -- -- -- -- Lutheran Church-Mo. Synod 2.693 2.789 2.763 2.626 2.628 Christian Church(Disciples) 1.918 1.424 1.302 1.178 1.116 Episcopal Church 3.429 3.286 2.857 2.786 2.739 Presbyterian Church (USA) 3.984 4.045 3.536 3.362 3.048 United Church of Christ 2.070 1.961 1.819 1.736 1.684 United Methodist Church 11.067 10.509 9.861 9.519 9.192 INCREASING Assemblies of God .572 .625 .785 1.064 2.083 So. Baptist Convention 10.771 11.628 12.733 13.600 14.477 Latterday Saints (Mormon) 1.789 2.073 2.337 2.811 3.860 Roman Catholic Church 46.246 48.215 48.882 50.450 52.656

DECREASING 1986 1987 American Lutheran Church 2.319 * Lutheran Church America 2.896 * Evang.Luth. Church America * 5.288 Lutheran Church-Mo. Synod 2.631 2.614 Christian Church(Disciples) 1.107 1.087 Episcopal Church 2.504 2.462 Presbyterian Church (USA) 3.007 2.968 United Church of Christ 1.676 1.662 United Methodist Church 9.125 9.052 INCREASING Assemblies of God 2.135 2.161 So. Baptist Convention 14.614 14.723 Latterday Saints (Mormon) N.A. 4.000 Roman Catholic Church 52.893 53.497

*The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was organized in 1987, merging the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America and the Assn. of Evangelical Lutheran Churches. Source: Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches, 1989