Which denominations are growing

A little less than half of Americans are claimed by a local congregation of any religion. The Catholic Church remains the largest faith community with 59 million adherents though it is in decline.

It has lost about five percent from to or a total of three million people. The largest Protestant denomination is the Southern Baptist Convention with 50, congregations and 20 million adherents. It too has lost ground in the last decade despite its long-standing emphasis on evangelism and church growth.

About four percent of Americans now belong to nondenominational congregations. This segment is among the top five religious groups in every state but two and in 88 percent of U. This development shocked researchers with its rapid rise, although there have been hints in this direction in several recent surveys.

It has grown by 50 percent in the ten years from to and is the fastest-growing group in 26 states Growth in the number of Seventh-day Adventist adherents over the decade was about 30 percent, the highest growth rate among Christian denominations with more than a half million members.

Last year USA Today published a report listing the Adventist Church as the fastest growing Christian denomination in America and these data sustain that description. A comparision of the data from the U. Religious Census data also reveals that the two studies count different things. The USA Today story was about membership and this report is about adherents. Both reports are entirely accurate. The Census of Religion found about 1. There were Adventist congregations in 1, of the 3, counties in the nation or about 60 percent of these local government units.

Los Angeles County in California had the largest number of Adventist congregations and adherents 44, Walla Walla County in Washington state had the biggest percentage of Adventist adherents in the local population, a total of One of the most unexpected things to emerge from the Adventist data is the way the Adventist membership has shifted from a largely rural and small-town base to a largely urban base.

A total of 73 percent of Adventist adherents in were connected with congregations in metropolitan areas, nearly 60 percent in metropolitan areas with populations over one million. Only 12 percent of the Adventist adherents are connected with congregations in rural areas and another 15 percent in what the U.

The Census of Religion has published a series of maps showing the location of Adventist adherents and congregations by county and city. The vast majority of Adventist congregations are clustered along the coast of California, Oregon and Washington and in the Washington DC to Boston corridor on the east coast.

The Mormon growth comes at a time when it appears that an LDS member, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, will be the nominee for president of one of the two major political parties. And a major Broadway play about Mormon culture has had a successful run for much of the last year. Non-Christian religions have had even more rapid growth in the last decade.

The Muslim population, for example, is growing at a faster rate than the general population in America. This study found 2, Muslim centers with more than 2. This represents an increase of 67 percent since A total of religious bodies submitted data about the location and number of adherents in each of their congregations for this study.

They represent more than 90 percent of all the individuals who participate in religious groups in the country. Religious Census. It originated in after the official government census bureau decided that it would no longer collect information about religion because of concerns about violations of the First Amendment.

It was replicated in , , and A summary report and a number of maps for each of the participating religions can be downloaded at www. My experience in visiting some California Mega Baptist churches is that a large number of attendees are not concerned about identifying as Baptist.

Many mega churches will invite individuals to be part of their choir or other positions without being baptisted members. These mega churches typically have very low administration overhead.

One Baptist church told that they pay their Conference about Most attendees regard themselves as Christians and the church they are attending is meeting their needs, should this change, they will migrate to another congregation. This news account brings back recollections of the evolution of Adventist public relations work, as I experienced it from to For a period of time between and , there was considerable interest in the Adventist Church in promoting and entrenching the brand name "Seventh-day Adventist" in North American culture.

But near the end of that time period, it became evident that a reaction was setting in, in North American Christian culture, against denominationalism a kind of "Occupy Christianity" anti-corporatism and during that time "awareness" advertising virtually ceased for the Adventist church, the "Communication Department" of the denomination began focusing more and more on internal communication with Adventist membership, and some Adventist churches began minimizing or even removing from their church signs references to the "Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Even so, there still seems to be a strong, lingering presumption at the General Conference level that growth in corporate book membership is a strong indicator of how far we have come, and how far we have to go to "finish the work.

What is the minimal numerical attainment correlative with a "finished work"? Frankly, none seems to stand out as intuitively representative of completion. And with the apparent de-emphasis on denominationalism, it would appear that this kind of monitoring of numbers becomes more and more meaningless in terms of measuring attitudes, across the expanse of the denominations.

To know the trends is instructive, but less and less definitive of actual "strength" of the dominant messages of these churches. The breadth of opinion even within Adventism itself is now so broad, numbers alone say less and less about the presumptive beliefs held even by active membership. It would seem that we would be well advised to begin to move toward a psychographic profiling of religious belief and practice, rather than denominationally-pegged numbers.

A thousand questions can be asked to measure a hundred different things, but what do the answers really tell us? First, the rise in nondenominational churches shows growing disenchantment with traditional or mainline churches. Second, Adventist growth parallels national growth so it is not growing in relation to the general population. Third, our church has become insignificant.

More than half of to year old pastors 55 percent say their church is growing, while 33 percent of pastors 45 and older say the same. Evangelical churches are more likely to be growing 42 percent than their mainline counterparts 34 percent.

Less than a quarter 23 percent of churches with an average worship attendance of fewer than 50 say they are growing, while most churches with or more in attendance 59 percent are growing. Among denominations, Holiness 56 percent and Baptist 45 percent pastors are more likely to say their churches are growing than Methodists 33 percent and Lutherans 25 percent.

The lack of growth in worship attendance in most churches is matched by a lack of new commitments to Christ last year. Fifty-four percent of pastors say fewer than 10 people indicated a new commitment to Jesus Christ as Savior in , including 8 percent who had none. In some ways, however, those numbers mask deeper evangelistic issues.

When evaluating churches based on the number of conversions per attendees, 67 percent had fewer than 10 per people attending their church. Around a third 35 percent had fewer than five new commitments for every people attending their worship services. Forty-six percent of smaller churches fewer than 50 in worship services say they had 10 conversions or more for every in attendance, while only 18 percent of churches and above meet that benchmark.

While there are no major differences between evangelical and mainline churches in terms of new converts, denominational differences do exist. Religious demography is a zero-sum game. If one group grows larger that means that other groups must be shrinking in size. So that rise in the nones is bad news for churches, pretty much across traditions.

When you sort Christians by denomination, mainline Protestants are continuing to show significant decline. By their own membership tallies, mainline denominations are showing drops of 15 percent, 25 percent, and even 40 percent over the span of the last decade. There is little room for triumph on the evangelical side; their numbers are slipping too.

Examining these two traditions, though, shows us two different stories about how their churches are losing members and could offer a trajectory for what the American religious landscape will look like in the future. In , just over 30 percent of Americans were mainline, while about 21 percent were evangelicals. However, those lines began to converge quickly, and by there were more evangelicals in the United States than mainliners. This rapid shift in American religion was driven primarily by evangelicals becoming more prominent in American culture.

The rise of televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson coincided with the Religious Right beginning to assert itself in electoral politics. By the late s, evangelicals had become 25—27 percent of the population, and the mainline population was stuck around 20 percent. In , evangelicals hit their peak in the data at just under 30 percent and have since gone into a slow and steady decline over time.

Between and , the decline among evangelicals has been relatively modest—just about two percentage points. The mainline also declined three times as fast during this same time period, dropping from 16 percent in to just over 10 percent in When you look at where both traditions started in , evangelicals are slightly up, while the mainline is significantly smaller.

There are two primary ways for religions to shrink. The first is through death without replacement. When older members die, the tradition gets smaller unless young people are raised up in the church to offset those losses. The other way a tradition decreases in size is through defection. That means people leave the religion in which they were raised for another faith group.

The General Social Survey asks respondents about the denomination in which they were raised as well as their current denomination.