Christian Forums

Thanks for the link. I would say the numbers are on the "optimistic" side. I doubt Little Rock has 57% of its population actually in churches.

Religious Map of the U.S.:

http://www.cleveland.com/news/agate.ssf?/news/more/0930religion.html


Regional faith differences affect politics, study says

09/30/02

Karen R. Long
Plain Dealer Reporter


Look at the patterns of religious conviction, here and across the nation, and some political trends become sharper.

The Pacific Northwest, which is the least "churched" section of America, numbers only a third of its citizens in congregations. It makes sense that Oregon would be more open to assisted suicide, and that municipalities in Washington state would be more prone to insuring gay and lesbian partners of employees, said Professor Egon Mayer, a sociologist at Brooklyn College in New York. The more conservative social positions of traditional churches have less sway in the Northwest.

   
Closer to home, the Catholic nature of Ohio probably helps explain why Ohio has publicly funded school busing for private school children, which doesn't exist in most states, noted Mark Cassell, a Kent State University political scientist. There are 2.2 million Catholic Ohioans, accounting for 43 percent of the citizens who go to services.

Thanks to an exhaustive new survey compiled by the Glenmary Research Center in Nashville, Tenn., some of the repercussions of religion in American political life are easier to read.

"One of the major ways America differs from other modern societies is the importance our citizens place on religion," Mayer said. "We are the most religious nation on the face of the Earth." He said Americans' levels of observance outpace even countries such as India.

Eighty-one percent of Americans express a religious preference, according to the American Religious Identification Survey of 2001. The Glenmary data, taken county by county in 2000 from the registers of 149 denominations, finds half of all Americans are also participants. More than 140 million Americans are members of a mosque, synagogue, temple, church or other faith home.

Even at that, the Glenmary researchers acknowledged there are millions of believers they failed to count. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, with an estimated 2.5 million members, declined to participate. So did the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, with 1.3 million congregants.

The decisions to opt out of the study illustrated some of the politics of religion, Mayer said. Some faith groups shied away from the Glenmary Research Center, despite its strong reputation, because it is the research arm of a Catholic missionary group, he said.

"I don't want the salvation of my soul to depend on the accuracy of these numbers," joked Kenneth Sanchagrin, sociologist and Glenmary's lead statistician. Nevertheless, he said the data was powerful because it can be compared across time. The center also studied county-by-county congregational numbers in 1971, 1980 and 1990. The United States census quit asking about religion in the 1940s, concerned about the separation of church and state.

The Glenmary researchers estimated that 6.1 million Jews lived in the United States in 2000, but no single county was predominantly Jewish.

Gretchen Wolfram of the Lilly Endowment Inc., a foundation in Indianapolis that spent $150,000 on the study, called the findings "a treasure trove."

For instance, the research shows the national decline of rural churches, which was one key factor in the 13.7 percent decline in the United Methodist church in Ohio between 1990 and 2000. It lost 87 Ohio congregations in those 10 years.

Such shrinkage was evident in other Protestant mainline churches, from the Presbyterians to the Episcopalians to the United Church of Christ.

"It's really clear that the old-line churches like mine don't appeal to the 20- and 30-somethings as much as the evangelical churches with their contemporary style of worship," said the Rev. Dean Myers, who leads 200 Presbyterians at the Church of the Western Reserve in Pepper Pike. "It's a huge issue in the church. So many of our congregations have declined to the point that we can't keep our buildings up and we can't pay our pastors."

In Ohio, Presbyterians lost 18 churches and 21 percent of membership in a single decade. Episcopalians lost three congregations and 15 percent of state membership. Mayer said part of the explanation was that American society appears to be becoming more secular.

"Overall, the numbers of people who have left religion have grown tremendously," he said. "Our research indicates that the number that have no religion has gone from 14 million nationally in 1990 to 29,481,000 in 2001. That is a doubling in one decade."

Those who did attend services could choose from 268,254 houses of worship across the nation, including 35 Zoroastrian churches. Zoroastrianism is an ancient Persian religious system founded by Zoroaster and predating Islam.

The most religious county in Ohio was Mercer, a largely Catholic segment in the western part of the state, with 84 percent of its 39,443 residents belonging to congregations. The least worshipful was Vinton County, a sparsely populated stretch of southern Ohio where just 17.2 percent of its 11,098 citizens were church members. Cuyahoga County, with 57.81 percent of residents belonging to religious groups, was the 11th most observant of the state's 88 counties.

Denominations enjoying robust growth in the last decade tend to be those that have made the newest arrivals welcome: the Roman Catholics, the Evangelicals and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as Mormons.

The Glenmary research indicates that the makeup of both Florida and California, two population centers, has grown more Catholic in the last 10 years. An influx of Vietnamese and Hispanics, including Filipinos, has filled the pews of not only the Catholic churches, but also those of other denominations, such as the Assemblies of God.

"Growth is affected by many different factors," said Sherri Doty, an Assemblies of God statistician in Springfield, Mo. "One thing we've been very thankful for is we've been blessed with growth in ethnic communities. From 1990 to 2000, we've seen a 29 percent growth in the numbers of Hispanic congregations and a 53 percent growth in Hispanic membership."

Rick Krivanka, who leads pastoral planning for the 800,000 members of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese, said he was intrigued that local church growth mirrors the national trend.

"Nationality parishes helped build this diocese, and that trend continues in this new century," Krivanka said. The two newest parishes in Cuyahoga County are St. Andrew Kim, a Korean church in Tremont, and Sagrada Familia, a Hispanic congregation on Cleveland's West Side. In addition, St. Boniface on West 54th Street serves a growing Vietnamese community and is led by a Vietnamese American priest.

Maude Wynn Metcalf, a 94-year-old Unitarian, looked at the Glenmary data in a different way. It found only 6,112 members of her church in Ohio. In Cuyahoga County, it counted five congregations with 1,603 members. "Numbers aren't everything," Metcalf said. "There aren't many Unitarians, but every single one of us is important. In that way, we stand out."

African-American churches didn't participate, by and large; that's a gigantic flaw in the data.

I note that the Mormons are listed as having 4.2 million members; they claim 5.2.  

Our little congo is slowly growing...

I don't think that the battles we fight here over our mutual anathemas have helped, one bit....

Here in West Virginia, we have the second "best" ratio of churches to people in the country.  Sounds good. . . until. . . we see that we have the fifth lowest percentage of people who actually belong to any of these churches, and are far below the national average.

I can see this.  Every week I see a large number of building with only five or six cars out front.  It's time we stopped trying to steal members from other churches and realized how many "unchurched" really are out there.

The other surprise for me here was that in our local area the Christian Church outnumbers us 3 to 1.  They made some overtures to us a couple of years ago, but no one seemed interested.  Too bad.  We could gain quite a bit from their fellowship.

A lot of that's regional, though, and in spite of reputation, here in WV we're not really part of the Bible Belt.  You can tell a huge difference living here and living in Tennessee or some such place.

I can see myself, too, that, in this area, more and more people over the last couple of decades have no ties to any church at all.  

btw, are you saying that the only reason you've reached three million posts is because of double posting?

To be published tomorrow:  details available at their website:  

www.glenmary.org/grc/RCMS_2000/release.htm

Specific figures for churches can be found for metro areas, along w/ a host of other info., based on the Glenmary data at:

http://ext.nazarene.org/rcms

For CS congos:  

The:

c of C stands as 13th largest in the U.S.:  1 645 584

-- > but, it lost something like 6 percent of membership over the last 10 years.

the independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, ranked 15th, but grew by 4 percent, at:  1 439 253

DoC's stand at 17th largest:  1 017 784.

Check it out.

Man,

Restoration movement churches are getting clobbered by the Southern Baptists in OKC.  Well, I guess everyone is.

Kevin

Our local paper ran some of this info. over the weekend.

According to it, a couple of denom. churches lost a lot of membership, but the churches of Christ grew quite a bit locally.

My Mike wants to know where all those new people are!  He hasn't seen them. :D

[!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote (kebecer1 @ Sep. 30 2002,06:41)[/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--]Religious Map of the U.S.:

http://www.cleveland.com/news/agate.ssf?/news/more/0930religion.html


Regional faith differences affect politics, study says

09/30/02

Karen R. Long
Plain Dealer Reporter


Look at the patterns of religious conviction, here and across the nation, and some political trends become sharper.

The Pacific Northwest, which is the least "churched" section of America, numbers only a third of its citizens in congregations. It makes sense that Oregon would be more open to assisted suicide, and that municipalities in Washington state would be more prone to insuring gay and lesbian partners of employees, said Professor Egon Mayer, a sociologist at Brooklyn College in New York. The more conservative social positions of traditional churches have less sway in the Northwest.

   
Closer to home, the Catholic nature of Ohio probably helps explain why Ohio has publicly funded school busing for private school children, which doesn't exist in most states, noted Mark Cassell, a Kent State University political scientist. There are 2.2 million Catholic Ohioans, accounting for 43 percent of the citizens who go to services.

Thanks to an exhaustive new survey compiled by the Glenmary Research Center in Nashville, Tenn., some of the repercussions of religion in American political life are easier to read.

"One of the major ways America differs from other modern societies is the importance our citizens place on religion," Mayer said. "We are the most religious nation on the face of the Earth." He said Americans' levels of observance outpace even countries such as India.

Eighty-one percent of Americans express a religious preference, according to the American Religious Identification Survey of 2001. The Glenmary data, taken county by county in 2000 from the registers of 149 denominations, finds half of all Americans are also participants. More than 140 million Americans are members of a mosque, synagogue, temple, church or other faith home.

Even at that, the Glenmary researchers acknowledged there are millions of believers they failed to count. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, with an estimated 2.5 million members, declined to participate. So did the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, with 1.3 million congregants.

The decisions to opt out of the study illustrated some of the politics of religion, Mayer said. Some faith groups shied away from the Glenmary Research Center, despite its strong reputation, because it is the research arm of a Catholic missionary group, he said.

"I don't want the salvation of my soul to depend on the accuracy of these numbers," joked Kenneth Sanchagrin, sociologist and Glenmary's lead statistician. Nevertheless, he said the data was powerful because it can be compared across time. The center also studied county-by-county congregational numbers in 1971, 1980 and 1990. The United States census quit asking about religion in the 1940s, concerned about the separation of church and state.

The Glenmary researchers estimated that 6.1 million Jews lived in the United States in 2000, but no single county was predominantly Jewish.

Gretchen Wolfram of the Lilly Endowment Inc., a foundation in Indianapolis that spent $150,000 on the study, called the findings "a treasure trove."

For instance, the research shows the national decline of rural churches, which was one key factor in the 13.7 percent decline in the United Methodist church in Ohio between 1990 and 2000. It lost 87 Ohio congregations in those 10 years.

Such shrinkage was evident in other Protestant mainline churches, from the Presbyterians to the Episcopalians to the United Church of Christ.

"It's really clear that the old-line churches like mine don't appeal to the 20- and 30-somethings as much as the evangelical churches with their contemporary style of worship," said the Rev. Dean Myers, who leads 200 Presbyterians at the Church of the Western Reserve in Pepper Pike. "It's a huge issue in the church. So many of our congregations have declined to the point that we can't keep our buildings up and we can't pay our pastors."

In Ohio, Presbyterians lost 18 churches and 21 percent of membership in a single decade. Episcopalians lost three congregations and 15 percent of state membership. Mayer said part of the explanation was that American society appears to be becoming more secular.

"Overall, the numbers of people who have left religion have grown tremendously," he said. "Our research indicates that the number that have no religion has gone from 14 million nationally in 1990 to 29,481,000 in 2001. That is a doubling in one decade."

Those who did attend services could choose from 268,254 houses of worship across the nation, including 35 Zoroastrian churches. Zoroastrianism is an ancient Persian religious system founded by Zoroaster and predating Islam.

The most religious county in Ohio was Mercer, a largely Catholic segment in the western part of the state, with 84 percent of its 39,443 residents belonging to congregations. The least worshipful was Vinton County, a sparsely populated stretch of southern Ohio where just 17.2 percent of its 11,098 citizens were church members. Cuyahoga County, with 57.81 percent of residents belonging to religious groups, was the 11th most observant of the state's 88 counties.

Denominations enjoying robust growth in the last decade tend to be those that have made the newest arrivals welcome: the Roman Catholics, the Evangelicals and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as Mormons.

The Glenmary research indicates that the makeup of both Florida and California, two population centers, has grown more Catholic in the last 10 years. An influx of Vietnamese and Hispanics, including Filipinos, has filled the pews of not only the Catholic churches, but also those of other denominations, such as the Assemblies of God.

"Growth is affected by many different factors," said Sherri Doty, an Assemblies of God statistician in Springfield, Mo. "One thing we've been very thankful for is we've been blessed with growth in ethnic communities. From 1990 to 2000, we've seen a 29 percent growth in the numbers of Hispanic congregations and a 53 percent growth in Hispanic membership."

Rick Krivanka, who leads pastoral planning for the 800,000 members of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese, said he was intrigued that local church growth mirrors the national trend.

"Nationality parishes helped build this diocese, and that trend continues in this new century," Krivanka said. The two newest parishes in Cuyahoga County are St. Andrew Kim, a Korean church in Tremont, and Sagrada Familia, a Hispanic congregation on Cleveland's West Side. In addition, St. Boniface on West 54th Street serves a growing Vietnamese community and is led by a Vietnamese American priest.

Maude Wynn Metcalf, a 94-year-old Unitarian, looked at the Glenmary data in a different way. It found only 6,112 members of her church in Ohio. In Cuyahoga County, it counted five congregations with 1,603 members. "Numbers aren't everything," Metcalf said. "There aren't many Unitarians, but every single one of us is important. In that way, we stand out."[/quote]
According to the map, the Baptists have done a terrific job bringing people in the south into a relationship with Christ.  It looks like we have a lot to learn from them.

Kevin

Twice today I've double-posted--something I'd never done on this board before!

Marc, I'm convinced it's not always our error.  There's something glitchy going on sometimes.

My friend the preacher from down the bayou says there are no such things as unchurched people.  What he means has to do with the religious climate down here, and the way people who may have been sprinkled as an infant, and who have a grandmother who calls herself an active Catholic, call themselves one, too.

Really, there are Piccadilly Christians all over.

The massive numbers of "unchurched" must be out there, but they're harder to find in an atmosphere where alliegance grows from being in the same area your family has been in for 5 generations, and calling yourself whatever Grandpa called himself.