Slight Growth in Church Membership

Growth in membership of U.S. churches stagnated in 1998, according to the 2000 edition of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches.

The yearbook reported a cumulative U.S. church membership of 158.3 million as of 1998, an increase of 791,000 over 1997. That increase was smaller than the overall U.S. population growth, according to the yearbook, compiled by the National Council of Churches.

The yearbook said stagnation “may be due more to religious pluralism than to a decline in overall religious affiliation rates.” That is, non-Christian faiths are a growing sector of the population.

In addition to data on churches, the yearbook for the first time lists organizations for non-Christian faiths. It includes maps showing locations of U.S. Muslim mosques, scattered nationwide, and Buddhist temples, largely clustered on the West Coast and in the Northeast.

Statistics for Protestant churches raise doubts about the belief that conservative denominations are growing while progressive ones are declining, the yearbook noted. The Southern Baptist Convention and the more liberal Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) suffered similar annual membership losses of about 1%.

The Southern Baptist Convention remains the second-largest U.S. denomination behind the Roman Catholic Church, which grew by 1.3% to 62 million.

Separately, the Lutheran World Federation reported that the number of Lutherans worldwide increased last year from 61.5 million to 63.1 million.

Half the world’s Lutherans live in Europe, but the biggest numerical increase occurred in Asia, where there were 6.5 million Lutherans in 1999 compared with 4.8 million the previous year. Most of that growth occurred in Indonesia’s Protestant Christian Batak Church.

The largest U.S. Lutheran group, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, reported 5.1 million members, a slight loss.