Americans don’t pay much attention to the National Council of Churches anymore. In my classes when I ask students if they have heard of the NCC I usually receive blank stares. (For what it’s worth, not many students or Americans pay much attention to the National Association of Evangelicals.) Back in the day, memos from the NCC were even more important than blog posts at the Gospel Coalition are today. After all, the NCC’s membership consisted of all the largest and historic Protestant denominations, and most of the nation’s political officials, corporate executives, and professors were members of those denominations.
One NCC publication that still merits attention is the annual Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. It not only contains useful information on denominations — their history, location, contact data — but also it reports the latest membership statistics for practically all denominations (someone needs to buy a copy to see if they include Networks).
Here are the latest figures on the top 25 denominations in the United States:
1. The Catholic Church, 68,503,456
2. Southern Baptist Convention,16,160,088
3. The United Methodist Church, 7,774,931
4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6,058,907
5. The Church of God in Christ, 5,499,875
6. National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc, 5,000,000
7. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 4,542,868
8. National Baptist Convention of America, Inc., 3,500,000
9. Assemblies of God, 2,914,669
10. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 2,770,730
11. African Methodist Episcopal Church, 2,500,000
11. National Missionary Baptist Convention of America, 2,500,000
13. The Lutheran Church– Missouri Synod (LCMS), 2,312,111
14. The Episcopal Church, 2,006,343
15. Churches of Christ, 1,639,495
16. Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, 1,500,000
17. Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, Inc., 1,500,000
18. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 1,400,000
19. American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A., 1,310,505
20. Jehovah’s Witnesses, 1,162,686
21. United Church of Christ, 1,080,199
22. Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), 1,076,254
23. Christian Churches and Churches of Christ , 1,071,616
24. Seventh-Day Adventist Church. 1,043,606
25. Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc. 1,010,000
Two observations:
1) So much for transformationalism: the next time the emergents, hipsters, missionals, urbanists, and neo-Calvinists want to talk about how they are change-agents in both the church and society they should look at the numbers and sober up.
2) Trust but verify: how many of these figures are accurate? I mean, how do you have a nice round number, like 5 million in the case of the National Baptist Convention, and expect people to suppress doubt? In fact, one of the consequences of the separation of church and state is that no government agency keeps statistics on churches. That means that compilers of data like the NCC depend on churches to supply accurate figures. As if.
Not only is it possible for churches to inflate their membership statistics for the sake of self-justification, but how many communions actually purge their membership rolls, let alone practice discipline? Even on my session we find we have members still on our rolls who have moved and either have not sent in new church information or have moved on because they are no longer active in church. Since erasing someone from the roll is a serious matter, we make every effort possible to inquire with someone about their current church affiliation or level of religious observance before erasure. But since finding a member after several moves and changes of address is very difficult, church rolls tend to be larger than the real number of members even in congregations where officers try to have accurate numbers.
One can only imagine the bloat that afflicts membership in denominations like the United Church of Christ that claim the mixed heritage of John Winthrop, Lyman Beecher, John Williamson Nevin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Jeremiah Wright.
Old Life 
One of the statistics which is often overlooked on the “verify” side of the equation is the population growth of the U.S. The population of the U.S. is 50% larger than it was in 1970. To have simply kept up with the growth in the U.S. population, a denomination should have 50% more members today than it did in 1970. Instead, many of the largest denominations have been losing1-2% of their membership year after year.
Of course, the NCC statistics don’t include all the “independent” groups or organizations like Calvary Chapel; but the statistical picture is still pretty bleak for those who are looking for the church to transform American culture (a more sober analysis would show that American culture is transforming U.S. denominations more than the other way around).
LikeLike
Darryl:
Re: the apostate TEC, while they may tout 2 million on the rolls, about 700,000 attend on an average Sunday. Aging and headed into the dustbin of a mystery religion.
Phil
LikeLike
I interned at a PC(USA) church (before my conversion to orthodoxy) that had 550 members on the active roll and had roughly 95 each Lord’s Day.
I attended a PC(USA) church (the former church of Clarence McCartney) that still had somewhere around 750 on the active rolls and averaged around 150-200 each Lord’s Day.
LikeLike
As an aside I am not really sure what this has to do with “transformationalists”?
LikeLike
As another aside if you add up all of the NAPARC churches you have what? 500,000?
LikeLike
Rev. Glaser,
That’s a good figure. I estimated once it was about 600,000 but Scott Clark usually quotes the half-a-million figure so that’s likely a better estimate. And about 350,000 of that number is the PCA.
LikeLike
I figure with the PCA number the ARP and OPC have around 30,000 each and the URC have 20,000. With the 7,500 RPCNA + the smaller denominations that make up NAPARC we would at least get to 450,000. Not sure if you know how big the KAPC is…
LikeLike
Forget discipline: let’s just talk about attendance. Recent polls suggest that something like 43-43% of people say they go to church every week. That’s probably overreported, but we’ll just take it as read for the moment. That’s like 129 million people. But just the list above includes over 142 million, and there’s no record at all of the umpty-million people attending churches that don’t show up on that list. I mean, put together the Vineyard and the Four Square churches and you’ve got half a million right there.
Which is kind of ironic, because it’s those smaller churches that are going to have a lot lower membership-to-attendance ratio. I’d be surprised if Catholic churches saw much more than 30 million people a week.
LikeLike
As long as we’re talking attendance and transformationism, I recall Dr. Stob preaching in our PM service. Retired from Calvin College and Headmastering a Presbyterian day school in Florida with a curious penchant for stats, he relayed that only 10% of the families at his school attend church weekly. Whatever else that stat suggests, it has always seemed to me that transformationism doesn’t seem to have done much for Christian piety. Maybe it’s time to dump the emphasis on the organic church at the expense of the institutional?
LikeLike