Two items about the PCUSA caught my attention this morning. The first was about a little church in the Pittsburgh Presbytery that is moving to the EPC. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Fourth Presbyterian Church, a tiny congregation in Friendship, has voted to ask Pittsburgh Presbytery for permission to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA) for the more theologically conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
It is the third congregation in the presbytery to do so, and among at least 36 of the denomination’s 10,000 congregations to do so in the past two years. Leaders of the departing congregations believe that the Presbyterian Church (USA) tolerates dissent on core doctrinal issues, such as salvation through Christ alone, and that it is moving away from commitment to traditional Christian sexual ethics.
Sunday’s vote to leave was 27-2 at Fourth Presbyterian, which has about 40 members. Unlike most of the other churches that have followed this path, it has not formally asked to keep its property. Also, Fourth’s pastor, the Rev. David Schrader, has said he intends to stay with the Presbyterian Church (USA) rather than leave with his congregation.
“We’ve been working in good faith with the presbytery, and have confidence that we will reach consensus on all of the relevant factors, including the property,” said Carl Schartner, an elder at Fourth. He declined to answer further questions, saying that he wanted presbytery officials to speak on the church’s behalf.
So here we have a church of fewer than 50 members, deciding to leave property and even pastor behind in order to follow the Lord’s leading and to be obedient to His truth. I salute them, and their sacrifice. Fourth Presbyterian is but a tiny fraction of this total loss, but I think it interesting to consider that it isn’t just big churches–the Rosevilles and Memorial Parks–that are bolting the PCUSA. Middle sized and small churches are as well, despite their inability to fight the denomination for their property, simply because they believe that it is the Lord’s leading and the right thing to do to uphold the gospel, and in some instances in order to have a fighting chance for the future.
The second is from the Layman Online, and it has to do with the membership losses the PCUSA is expecting in the next couple of years:
Including 50,000 members from congregations that have “withdrawn,” the Presbyterian Church (USA) is anticipating that 95,343 members – the largest number ever – will have left the denomination in 2007, a drop of 4.4 percent of its total membership of 2,171,775 in that year.
In 2008, with no specific allowance made for congregations leaving the denomination, membership losses are projected to be 43,436, a drop of 2.0 percent of its total membership, according to the projections released during the recent General Assembly Council meeting in Louisville, Ky.
Since the PCUSA was formed in 1983 with 3,121,338 members, membership losses through the 2008 projections will have totaled nearly a million members – 992,999. Since 1965, when the PCUSA and its predecessor denominations reached its peak membership of 4,254,597 members, more than two million members – 2,126,258 or 50 percent of the membership – have left the PCUSA.
The continual decline in membership in 2007 and 2008 of 138,779 members follows on losses of 226,663 over the previous five years – 41,812 in 2002; 46,658 in 2003; 43,175 in 2004; 48,474 in 2005; and 46,544 in 2006. The total projected loss in members from 2002-2008 is 365,442 – or 17.2 percent of its total membership.
Underscoring the continued loss in members was a report, titled “Congregational Strengths and Subsequent Numerical Growth Among Presbyterian Church (USA) Congregations,” prepared by the denomination’s Research Services and presented at the Religious Research Association annual meeting Oct. 20, 2006, in Portland, Ore. That report found that only 24 percent of the congregations surveyed reported net membership growth in the period 2000-2005, compared with 35 percent reporting net membership growth in the period 1995-2000.
In addition to the numerical membership losses, the PCUSA also is experiencing a decade-long slide in the loss of churches. From 1996-2006, the PCUSA recorded a net loss of 887 churches, according to data from the denomination’s Research Services. That data arrived at its figure by looking at, on the “Churches Added” side, new churches, churches resulting from mergers and churches received; as well as, on the “Churches Subtracted” side, churches dissolved, churches dismissed and churches merged.
All in all, it’s a sad picture of a once-great denomination in decline. I know that some will blow this information off and act as though the losses don’t mean anything; after all, those who are gone were just “dead wood” or “malcontents” or “fundamentalists.” No doubt there is at least some small grain of truth in that, but if that’s all that denominational leadership can see (e.g., Clifton Kirkpatrick’s statement back in 2003 that PCUSA’s problem was that it was “losing our people to the secular world – to no active church affiliation,” rather than to other churches, seemingly forgetting that lots of congregations outside the mainline don’t report transfers in from mainline churches for a variety of reasons), then that decline will continue, with no end in sight.
Posted by David Fischler 
