by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
A Sunday school class in 1946 at Community (Methodist) Church in Wheelwright, Kentucky. Photo: Russell Lee, National Archives.
By Donald W. Haynes –
The American Sunday School Union was organized in 1827. By the 1840’s churches across America were beginning to build “wings” of classrooms for children and youth to be taught at the church, replacing the catechism which based Christian nurture in the home – taught mostly by parents but also by the circuit riders when they made pastoral calls and interrogated the children on their mastery of the catechetical questions. In Methodism, Sunday school also replaced the Wesleyan styled “class meeting” as the locus of both fellowship and biblical exhorting.
Mainline Protestant church growth in the 20th century was primarily due to the influence and attendance of Sunday school. As the context of evangelizing or bringing youth to affirming Jesus Christ as personal savior, the Sunday school had replaced the revival. In most non-liturgical churches, Sunday school attendance was considerably higher than worship attendance. In churches where pastors had more than one church, primarily in rural areas, only Sunday school met every Lord’s Day. The Sunday School Superintendent was usually the most influential lay leader in the church; he or she presided over the “assembly” that met before and after individual classes went to their respective rooms. In The Methodist Church, by 1958, seven of every eight professions of faith came through the Sunday school.
In 1957, LOOK magazine’s cover headline was “Sunday School: The Most Wasted Hour of the Week?” The response was a firestorm of opposition, but the article was at least partially based on raw data from a survey of people who had attended Sunday school for at least ten years. They were asked a series of basic Bible-content questions and were found to be embarrassingly biblically illiterate. Ten years later, Sunday school in the more theologically liberal denominations began a precipitous free fall. The so called “mainline” denominations made a number of knee-jerk efforts to stop the ebbing tide, but “Humpty Dumpty” could not be “be put together again.”
By 2018, thousands of churches have literally no children in Sunday school. The only attendance left in those churches is in older adult classes. In many, perhaps most, independent church “plants,” there is no Sunday school at all, especially for adults.
First of all, why did this happen? For at least one documented answer, we must look at the largest denominational “combo” in America in the 1880’s – The Methodist Churches, north and south. “John Vincent and his southern counterpart, Atticus Haygood, led Methodism in the post Civil War era to see the Sunday School…effecting the conversion or transformation for which Methodism had looked to revivals,” reported the superlative historian Russell Richey.
John Vincent was the General Agent of the Methodist Episcopal Sunday School Union and “wrote the script” for the replacement of the revival with the Sunday school. J. Lyman Hurlbut’s The Story of the Bible, and Vincent’s “Uniform Sunday School Lesson” shifted the premise of conversion from an identifiable experience of saving grace to an embrace of the insights of the new social sciences – psychology and sociology.
In 1882, Vincent wrote The Revival After the Revival. In it, he interpreted his parents’ evangelical theology as the “morbid, self-centered religion of my childhood.” He saw sin as a “habit that could be bleached out of a person by right associations.” He considered “being saved” as a selfish concept, making one “safe from the world and guaranteed a home in heaven.” Consequently, every piece of Methodist Sunday school curriculum was a bland form of Christianity – Old Testament biographical narratives, a portrait of Jesus as “gentle, meek, and mild”; and the embrace of conventional cultural morality. There was no mention of the atonement, Pentecost, or experiential grace.
Meanwhile in southern Methodism, Atticus Haygood was the counterpart of John Vincent. He was appointed in 1870 as editor in chief of all Methodist Episcopal, South, Sunday school curriculum. The lesson was a benign moralism to teach children to be good boys and girls. The biblical content was a romanticized story of Nativity, no mention of atonement, original sin, or the work of the Holy Spirit, and narrowly selected Epistle passages. His biographer wrote that Haygood “underwent a deconversion” from his inherited Wesleyan, Arminian faith.
Both Vincent and Haygood became bishops and helped shape Methodism for relevance in a changing culture. Their successor was George Albert Coe, a disciple of John Dewey of Columbia University, the “father” of progressive education in the public schools of America. Coe was the virtual “czar” of Methodist Sunday school theology for the first third of the 20th century. He wrote, “The goal of Christian nurture thus becomes the growth of the young toward and into mature and efficient devotion to the democracy of God and happy self realization.”
For decades, professionals trained to be Christian educators were called “Directors of Religious Education,” not “Directors of Christian Education.” H. Shelton Smith, professor at Duke Divinity School, wrote a book in 1940 that should have shocked the Christian Education world, but it was basically ignored. In Faith and Nurture, Smith wrote, “The closing years of the 19th century reveal a marked trend in liberal circles toward a reduced Christology. The Christ of Sunday School became an historic Galilean, the supreme educator, the master teacher.” Dean Inge, professor of divinity at Cambridge and Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, wrote in the 20th century, “Contemporary liberalism as a creed is basically outmoded and must therefore be critically reconsidered and revised.”
Sunday school editors continued to write morality maxims, sentimentalized Bible stories, and selected psalms and epistle excerpts. The Sunday school, according to the famous LOOK cover article in 1957 had become “the only school in the world that was not a school.”
Therefore, when the Baby Boomers became adults in the 1960’s, they saw no value in going to Sunday school or taking their children in the way their parents took them. For one thing, they could recall very little that they had learned. For another, what they did learn seemed irrelevant to the generation of a sexual revolution and the Vietnam War. Gradually, slow erosion became a landslide and Sunday school’s Achilles’ Heel infected and affected the whole dimension of Christian nurture.
Donald W. Haynes is a retired United Methodist clergyperson from the Western North Carolina Annual Conference, author, and adjunct professor of United Methodist Studies at Hood Theological Seminary.
by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
By Justus Hunter –
I loved Sunday school. The gray-haired ladies corralled us into small rooms lined with hand-me-down toys. A flannelgraph easel occupied one corner, a sentry threatening our chaos with order. We learned Bible stories and hokey songs and how to keep our hands to ourselves.
My children will never know that Sunday school. I haven’t been in a church with a dedicated Sunday school hour in decades. At some point churches decided kids would stick around easier if you buy new toys every now and then. And if kids stick, parents stick.
Or so we thought. We built the most playful and accommodating spaces in the history of Christianity. And my generation fled.
Methodism’s relationship to Sunday school has always been ambivalent. Many argue the rise of the Sunday schools was a sign of Methodist decline. They prioritized intellect over heart. They fueled our move from revivalism into the mainline. They ripped out the heart of Methodism: discipleship through societies, classes, and bands.
John Wesley’s structured small groups – societies, classes, and bands – were remarkably successful. They spread Scriptural holiness across the land. But Wesley stood in a different position than we do today. He inherited a tradition in fine doctrinal shape. The doctrine of the Church of England was well-established. He worked for spiritual renewal in line with sound doctrine. What about us? Our experiments with doctrinal pluralism have left us doctrinally awash. We will always need spiritual renewal. But now we also need doctrinal renewal.
If my argument holds, then spiritual renewal through classes and bands and reemerging revivalism may be necessary, but they will not be sufficient. We also have to address our doctrinal indifference. We need a thickening of doctrine and tradition. And this will require significant effort at recovery, both of clear and essential teaching and of those methods whereby the church shapes lives by that teaching. We need doctrine and we need to propagate it.
This suggests we may need Sunday school now more than ever. As my generation left the church, those of us who stuck around are more and more concerned that our kids understand the faith we’ve held. Now more than ever, Christians young and old need to learn who they are. Toward that end, here are a few thoughts on what we might do with Sunday school, or whatever Christian education program has replaced it by now.
1. Teach them their history. Many nights I read from Plutarch’s Lives to my sons. Plutarch’s vignettes of the heroes of Greece and Rome have shaped character for centuries, and for good reason. Plutarch is a relentless, perceptive analyst of character. Tales of the people who shaped and sustained our places, help us make sense of who we are. They’re the kinds of stories we turn to when life gets confusing. We were made for heroes. We need examples. And if the church isn’t supplying them, someone else will.
Bible stories have been the backbone of Sunday school classes for all ages. Stories of Abraham and David and Esther and Christ will always work. But so will the stories of Perpetua and Felicity, or John and Charles Wesley. Adding to the Bible stories is important. Stories of the great saints of our faith give a sense of permanence. They remind us that the Spirit remains alive and active in the church. They remind us that our God is with us.
So keep the Bible stories. But find more. Tell them about the great saints of the Christian heritage. Tell them about the great saints of your church. Tell them about the faithful who planted it. Tell them about the missionaries it sent. Tell them.
2. Nourish faith while growing understanding. When we teach confirmation, we plan for a lot of information transfer. We want our kids to learn about the Trinity, who Jesus is, what the church is about, the sacraments, and the hope of heaven. But we don’t just want them to know a set of teachings. We want them to understand. We don’t just want them to tell us that Jesus is fully divine. We want them to find ways to live lives that testify to Jesus’s divinity.
Charles Wesley, praying for children, asked God to “unite the two so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.” The two go together. Dull piety is marked by a lack of knowledge. It substitutes pious sentiment for true understanding. Methodist classes were so formative because they gave early Methodists a common language of the soul. And that language was grounded in John Wesley’s teaching on the way of salvation. Early Methodists, in societies, classes, and bands, learned a way to speak the language of the soul, and learning that language allowed them to grow deeper in the faith.
Methodist Sunday school, if it is to recover the Wesleyan heritage, needs to be a space for recoupling. If your Sunday school classes are only about knowledge, complement them with vital piety. And watch for the warning sign of sentimentalism. You may have neither knowledge nor vital piety, and will need to work on both.
3. Love order like Wesley. One thing is certain: Sunday school isn’t necessary for the propagation the gospel. Sunday school is less than 300 years old, and the form you and I remember is significantly younger than that. It was an answer to a question American Methodists once asked. It was a similar question to the ones Wesley asked, and the one we ask. How do we propagate this faith? How do we nourish it in us and pass it on to others?
John Wesley was a master of order. His theological contributions were all in the doctrine of grace. He understood and explained the way of salvation, that path we pilgrims tread on the way to our heavenly home. His genius was chiefly in organizing meaningful methods for each stage of that journey, indeed every stage of that journey. He was wise about the way to holiness.
I don’t know if Sunday school is salvageable in your context. But I know that if we neglect to develop orderly structures for discipleship, structures that renew spiritually and doctrinally, then we risk another generation. The stakes are high. But we have an ideal example.
Justus Hunter is assistant professor of church history at United Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.
by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
By Tom Lambrecht –
In the aftermath of the highly contentious General Conference last February in St. Louis, many ideas have surfaced as a way to attempt to resolve the conflict dividing our church.
One of these ideas is a proposal from the denomination’s Connectional Table to create the United States portion of the church as its own Regional Conference, allowing it to make changes to the Book of Discipline as it relates specifically to churches here in the U.S. The church constitution already gives the central conferences outside the U.S. the ability to “make such rules and regulations for the administration of the work within their boundaries including such changes and adaptations of the General Discipline as the conditions in the respective areas may require.” The new proposal wants to give the U.S. part of the church authority to make the same “changes and adaptations” that the central conferences may.
The original reasoning behind the proposal was to allow U.S. delegates to act on matters that pertain only to the U.S. church. The prime example is the pension program for U.S. pastors and professional staff. There are also some resolutions on political or moral issues that pertain to conditions in the U.S. It has been asked: Why should delegates from outside the U.S. be forced to sit through arcane discussions about provisions that do not pertain to them?
More recently, however, some progressives and centrists have attached themselves to this proposal as a way to provide for the U.S. delegates to change the standards in the U.S. to allow clergy to perform same-sex weddings and for practicing gays and lesbians to be ordained. That way, conservative African UM churches could keep the current restrictions on such practices, while they are allowed in the U.S.
This is actually not a new idea. A similar proposal was passed by the 2008 General Conference in response to the report of the World Wide Nature of the Church study committee. While the constitutional amendments needed to implement such a proposal passed General Conference by more than the requisite two-thirds vote, it failed to be ratified by the members of the annual conferences. In fact, it failed to garner even a majority of annual conference member votes, let alone the two-thirds needed to ratify the proposal. The idea was tried again in 2016, but was defeated in legislative committee. The same arguments that were persuasive in defeating this Regional Conference idea in the past still apply.
1. There is no clarity on which parts of the Book of Discipline can be “changed or adapted.” Paragraph 101 of the Discipline lists the parts that cannot be adapted, including the doctrinal standards and the Social Principles, covering paragraphs 1-166. The Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters was supposed to come back to the 2020 General Conference with a proposal as to which of the remaining paragraphs (paragraphs 201-2719) could be adapted. They have wisely decided, in light of the deep conflict in the church and the possibility of separation, that they will delay their defining proposal until 2024.
That means under the current Discipline everything after Paragraph 166 can be adapted or changed by a central or regional conference. The adaptable section would cover over 80 percent of the Discipline, including matters related to ordination, marriage, and sexual ethics. Under this Regional Conference proposal, almost any part of the “operation, governance, witness, and ministry” of the church (in the words of the relevant petition) could be changed or adapted by U.S. delegates for U.S. churches.
What was originally being sold as a way to handle a few specific issues now has the potential to further erode our connection. Rather than continuing as a unified global church, we could evolve into a conglomeration of diverse national churches.
2. There is no evidence that this proposal will save money or time of the General Conference. Proponents believe that, by allowing U.S. delegates to deal with uniquely U.S. matters, several days could be cut from the ten-day General Conference, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, proponents have produced no evidence of such a saving. There has been no analysis of the petitions and resolutions proposed at previous General Conferences to determine how many of them would actually be able to be dealt with by only U.S. delegates. There has been no analysis of the time spent in legislative committees or in plenary sessions on U.S. only issues.
3. This proposal sets up a whole new level of bureaucracy. This bureaucracy would exist between the jurisdictional conference and the General Conference. It would include a regional “judicial court” to decide questions of church law arising from the region. The proposed legislation also gives the regional conference the authority to “establish such other agencies, commissions, or committees as it may determine are important to the work and witness of the Church in the United States.” At a time when we are cutting the general church budget by 20 percent and apportionment payments are drastically declining, why would we create an expensive new bureaucratic structure in the church? It has the potential of siphoning funds from the global church and from the mission and ministry of the church.
4. Many central conference delegates do not favor this proposal. In 2008, the annual conferences outside the U.S. – particularly in Africa – voted almost unanimously against this idea. While this proposal is being portrayed as coming from the central conferences, delegates from Africa whom I have talked to do not support it. They have told me they wonder why, now that delegates from outside the U.S. are approaching a majority of the church, the U.S. wants to cut itself off from the global voice. For 50 years, while global delegates were a small minority of the General Conference, the U.S. was content to set policies and procedures for the whole church, with a very limited right of adaptation given to acknowledge the differences in legal structures outside the U.S. But now, the U.S. does not want to be subject to the voice of the global church and is proposing to allow itself to “opt out” of the global policies and procedures at will. Such an approach does not feel to them either respectful or fair.
The Renewal and Reform Coalition believes this proposal for a U.S. Regional Conference does not merit resurrection.
Thomas Lambrecht is a United Methodist clergyperson and the vice president of Good News.
by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
Ghoussoon and her children are featured in the film Salam Neighbor. They are refugees from Syria. Photo: Mohab Khattab.
By Max A. Wilkins –
God is a missionary God. From the moment of creation as told in Genesis, God makes his missionary nature known. With Jesus’ earthly mission, God burst forth into creation showing his missional heart. Jesus not only modeled a missional life, he also established the Church and called her to join him in his mission. Thus, mission is the reason the church exists. And from its inception, the church has always been on mission. As The United Methodist Church wrestles with what it looks like to be the Church in 2020 and beyond, one thing is certain: we will always be called to be missional.
While the call to join Jesus in his mission is universal, there are multitudes of ways for the church to be on mission. And many of the models seen in the early church are still fruitful models today. Let’s look at five missionary models of the early church.
The Prayer Meeting Response. In his last instructions to his disciples before ascending to heaven, Jesus told them to go down to Jerusalem, get in a prayer meeting, get filled with the Holy Spirit, and, under the power of the Holy Spirit, to become missionary witnesses. The church was born as a result of that prayer meeting. And down through the ages many missionary movements have been launched in a similar fashion.
In the mid-1800s just such a prayer meeting took place among a group of Methodists. The result was a mission movement to West Africa. Though many of the members of that prayer meeting died young on the mission field, the remaining members continued to go. As a result, the Methodist Church of Ghana exists today, a church that saw over 55,000 new believers come to faith last year alone! There is power in the prayer meeting when the Holy Spirit shows up!
The Local Sending Church. Through the efforts of Paul, Barnabas, and others, God grew a great church in Antioch of Syria. It rapidly became a missional church. In 44 AD, the church at worship felt the prompting of the Holy Spirit to send forth missionaries into Asia Minor (see Acts 13). They laid hands on Paul and Barnabas and began a long, fruitful, multi-year engagement with missionaries sent out from their church. The missionaries from Antioch maintained a relationship with the church of accountability, support, encouragement, and resourcing. Many churches in North America today are becoming sending churches, or partnering with mission sending agencies to jointly send cross-cultural witnesses who maintain the same kinds of relationship with the church as witnessed in Acts 13.
The Immigrant Relations Strategy. Located along some major trade routes, ancient Palestine was a land of many immigrants and foreigners. The early church often took advantage of this home-grown opportunity for cross-cultural engagement with amazing results. In Acts 8, we read the story of Philip, an early church missionary. Sent by God from Jerusalem toward Gaza, he wasn’t at all sure where he was going; only what he was doing! Upon seeing a high official of the Ethiopian court, he knew his mission field. The ensuing engagement between Philip and the inquisitive foreigner resulted in new life for the Ethiopian, who immediately returned to Ethiopia and took the gospel with him! We see this pattern repeated throughout the New Testament. Today, with a global immigrant population exceeding 250 million people, there has never been a better or more fruitful season for employing this missional strategy.
The Mentor/Mentee Model. The Apostle Paul made several fruitless trips to a backwater town called Lystra. On his third trip, however, he encountered Timothy, a young man of mixed heritage about whom the believers spoke highly. Discerning both the gifts the Holy Spirit had implanted in Timothy and the missionary call of his life, Paul takes him on the road. In the next few years Paul not only mentored Timothy and modeled mission work for him, he also set Timothy on a course for an adult life as a missionary. Paul would subsequently repeat this model over and over again.
Today, missionary sending agencies are finding their greatest mobilizing success when current missionaries are putting forth the call to young people and then mentoring and modeling mission for them. And local churches that make a place for missionaries to put forth the call to their congregation are a big part of the success of this model.
The Persecution/Dislocation Model. Jesus called his disciples to be his witnesses not only in Jerusalem but to the ends of the earth. Sadly, in the earliest days of the church, the disciples found it more comfortable and convenient to remain in Jerusalem. Then persecution broke out against the church. Suddenly, in response to the persecution, the believers were displaced and scattered all over the Roman world. The result was missionary work to the ends of the earth!
No one likes persecution. We pray for the persecuted church. But the reality is that God can also redeem persecution. Indeed, though many of the current global displacement challenges have resulted in the uprooting of centuries old Christian communities around the globe, it has also afforded these refugees incredible platforms for engaging both their host countries, and their fellow refugees, in mission. It is also incredibly fruitful when churches in North America partner with refugee believers in their midst, and resource, encourage, and empower them for mission.
According to Acts, in the early church the Lord was adding to their numbers daily those who were embracing the gospel of Jesus Christ. The mission continues today. And, perhaps by embracing some of the missional strategies we see modeled in the early church, we will also see the kingdom fruit experienced by the early church. May it be so.
Max Wilkins serves as President and CEO of TMS Global. He previously pastored churches in Florida and Hawaii for 30 years.
by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
By B.J. Funk –
Wouldn’t it be nice if kindness made a comeback? Wouldn’t it be nice if we weren’t afraid to send our children to school, to go shopping at the mall, or to go without fear into a movie theater? Wouldn’t it be nice if church were a safe place to be, if sidewalks weren’t dangerous, and if Andy and Barney could walk the streets of our town without a gun?
Wouldn’t it be nice to go back many years ago and have Fred Rogers on television again, speaking kindness, love and acceptance to our children through his show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood? The show ran on PBS for over thirty-five years. He taped more than 900 programs, winning four Emmys for his slow-moving, slow-talking visits with the children in his television audience. His central message to them was “You are loved just the way you are.”
He sat before the camera and gave children what they needed every day, large doses of kindness with a huge amount of love. Without knowing his audience individually, he approached the children with a voice that said, “Come on in to my neighborhood. You are always welcomed here.” And the children knew they were.
Mr. Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister who kept his status with the church current by appearing regularly before church elders. But his calling was to bless children by teaching his central message of God’s love for all creation. He once said that his ministry was the “broadcasting of grace” throughout the land, and his vocation was to minister to children through the medium of television. Before taping each of those 900 programs, Rogers offered this simple prayer: “Let some word that is heard be thine.”
He had a name for the space between the viewer and the television set. He called that space, “Holy Ground.” That’s a beautiful picture for us in 2020. Unfortunately, that space is for some of our children not Holy Ground but instead a breeding ground for the unfortunate introduction of too much cursing, unnecessary fighting, and relentless screaming coming through the air waves. Some of our children, left alone without parental oversight, sit in the area Mr. Rogers called Holy and receive a far too early look into the raw and deviant side of humanity. Forgive us, Lord.
Mr. Rogers saw the potential for holiness in every experience through the power of the Holy Spirit. He brought the medium of kindness and acceptance as the doorway into faith and holy living. He invited the children to be his neighbor, to sit with him during his show as they joined hands in neighborly love.
Some have named him a televangelist to toddlers. He would likely have been uncomfortable with that thought, but that is exactly what he was doing. If our gospel is the gospel of grace, then Fred Rogers was seeking to offer the Good News of grace daily through his show.
Faith was so much a part of who he was, as it should be for each of us. His faith moved through his being in simple, yet powerful ways. Having faith was part of his makeup. It affected him in every moment.
If you haven’t thought about Fred Rogers lately, now would be a good time to renew your friendship with this soft-spoken man through the recent release of a movie about his life. Tom Hanks stars as Mr. Rogers in a delightful walk back to the years of his show, 1962-2001. Or you can read Shea Tuttle’s book, Exactly as You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers.
Practicing kindness has a profound effect on our own mental and physiological health. Being kind helps us to become happier and more compassionate towards others. Being kind can help boost our own immune system, slow down aging, elevate our self-esteem and improve blood pressure.
“Kindness makes a person attractive. If you could win the world, melt it, do not hammer it,” wrote Alexander MacClaren, an English minister born in the nineteenth century.
So, let’s see if we can do our part for kindness to make a comeback. It’s worth a try. And, by the way, will you be my neighbor?
by Steve | Jan 13, 2020 | January - February 2020, Magazine, Magazine Articles
Baptism at Christ’s Foundry Fellowship in Dallas. Photo courtesy of Christ’s Foundry Fellowship.
By Heather Hahn –
The U.S.’s majority status in The United Methodist Church is coming to an end – and may be there already. That’s according to projections from the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration – based on the continuing decline in U.S. membership as much as growth in Africa.
According to the agency’s forecast, total membership in the central conferences – church regions in Africa, the Philippines and Europe – will exceed that of the U.S. jurisdictions in 2020.
“Based on trends that have occurred over the last several years, we are annually averaging a decline of 2.0 percent overall for the jurisdictional membership,” Kevin Dunn, the agency’s director of data services, told the GCFA board at its November meeting. “We may fall below 6 million (U.S.) members by 2025.”
It’s a significant development for a church whose governance and history have both helped shape and been shaped by the United States, where the denomination got its start in 1784.
Dunn said the U.S. decline has largely resulted from members’ deaths – people leaving The United Methodist Church for the church triumphant.
However, starting in 2014, he said, the overall drop has exceeded the number of funerals. U.S. worship attendance also has been shrinking as a percentage of overall membership for the past decade.
Dunn noted that United Methodist numbers are in keeping with overall U.S. religious trends. In October, Pew Research Center reported losses across Christian groups while showing the religiously unaffiliated rising to more than a quarter of U.S. adults.
Even with shrinking U.S. rolls, The United Methodist Church is still the country’s third largest denomination – behind the Catholic Church and Southern Baptist Convention.
The most recent data GCFA actually has on hand is the U.S. membership and attendance figures for 2018. Unequal infrastructure and technology typically mean that membership reports are usually out of sync between the U.S. and the rest of the globe.
On its website, umdata.org, the agency reports the U.S. church had just under 6.7 million members at the end of 2018 — down from about 6.8 million in 2017. In the U.S., average weekly attendance was under 2.5 million in 2018, a decline of about 3.6 percent from the previous year.
The agency’s most recent data for the central conferences is from 2017, when the denomination counted more than 6.4 million members in Africa, Europe, and the Philippines. That’s up from about 5.7 million members in 2015.
However, the central conference total comes with an asterisk. On its data services website, GCFA notes that the 2017 numbers reflect the most recent submitted. Where conferences have not reported any new data, the agency carries over numbers from previous reporting.
The story of the church in the U.S. is not strictly one of decline. “We have some good news,” Dunn said. “Our Hispanic and multiracial growth has consistently been trending upwards 2 percent to 3 percent (a year) in each category.” Between 2009 and 2018, the number of U.S. members identifying as multiracial increased from 45,955 to 68,029. In the same period, the number of Hispanic United Methodists has grown from 68,088 to 80,968.
Family Fun Night at Christ’s Foundry Fellowship in Dallas. Photo courtesy of Christ’s Foundry Fellowship.
The predominantly Hispanic Christ’s Foundry Fellowship in Dallas is an example of that growth. The North Texas Conference decided more than 10 years ago to plant a congregation in a growing Latino neighborhood. The congregation that began as a small group worshipping in various locations has grown to 166 members and 228 in average weekly attendance.
The Rev. Lucia “Lucy” French, the congregation’s associate pastor, attributed the congregation’s growth to several programs the church instituted early on. These include small groups, a worker association to help people find employment and Family Wednesday — Miercoles de Familias — a time for children’s choir, youth group, parenting classes and marriage instruction. French, who came to Dallas from Quito, Ecuador in 2006, found her calling as a pastor by leading the Wednesday night programs.
“Everything that has happened in the growth and development at Christ’s Foundry has been the result of many collaborators, each bringing their unique strengths, resources, talents, and dedication to the effort,” she said, with interpretation from her husband, John.
Christ’s Foundry, which now has a building to call its own, is also now taking a lead role in the North Texas Conference’s response to recent tornadoes that wreaked havoc on the city.
“The congregation of Christ’s Foundry has been and continues to be blessed by the community, and has shown its ability and willingness to be a blessing to others in the community by living their faith,” the pastor said. “While head counts and budgets have their place, this is the best measure of success.”
What about General Conference?
Membership plays a large role in determining how many delegates each annual conference can send to General Conference, the denomination’s top lawmaking body. The Book of Discipline outlines a statistical formula for delegation size based on the number of clergy and professing lay members of each annual conference. Each annual conference must have a minimum of one lay and one clergy delegate. However, the latest figures from the General Council on Finance and Administration will not be reflected in the composition of next year’s General Conference.
The Rev. Gary Graves, General Conference secretary, determined the size of each annual conference’s delegation in 2017, based on data in the most recent annual conference journals submitted to GCFA.
Of the 862 delegates in 2020, 55.9 percent will be from the U.S., 32 percent from Africa, 6 percent from the Philippines, 4.6 percent from Europe and the remainder from concordat churches that have close ties to The United Methodist Church. Compared to the 2019 special session, the U.S. will have fewer delegates overall, while African delegations gain 18 and the Philippines two.
Heather Hahn is a multimedia news reporter for United Methodist News. Distributed by United Methodist News.
