Church attendance is falling in the U.S., but some evangelicals continue to comfort themselves with the false idea that their churches alone are still growing.
Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas gave the debunked claim fresh legs in his recent nationally syndicated piece on decline and division in The United Methodist Church, writing: “Evangelical churches that believe and preach Scripture are growing.”
He didn’t cite a source for his claim.
Cal Thomas
Days after his column began appearing in newspapers across the country and on websites, the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest evangelical body, released statistics about its latest annual decline. SBC membership, now just under 13 million, has fallen for 17 straight years from the 2006 peak of 16.3 million.
Southern Baptists are not alone. About 40 million American adults who used to go to church no longer do so, say the authors of The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?
“The Great Dechurching, (is) comparable to the Great Awakening earlier in American history, only in the reverse,” they write. “More people have left the church in the last 25 years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening and the Billy Graham crusades combined.”
BNG attempted to contact Thomas about his error through Tribune Publishing Co., which syndicates his columns. No one responded. Thomas calls his columns “Informed Conservative Political Commentary, and claims: “Truth Is Not Subjective.”
Thomas, 81, was for many years a member of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Md., which is affiliated with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a denomination that has experienced its own decline.
“As of March 2020, we have more than 630 churches with approximately 145,000 members. And we’re growing!” says the EPC website. But EPC statistics for 2022 show a decline to 125,870 members, down from a 2016 peak of 150,042.
The Assemblies of God is growing globally but declining in the U.S. Its 2022 membership of 2,928,143 was down from the 2019 peak of 3,295,923.
Meanwhile, the Presbyterian Church in America — a conservative denomination — grew by 9,807 members between 2019 (383,721) and 2023 (393,528). That’s a 2.5% growth rate in four years.
Clearly, some churches are growing. Outreach, a church marketing company, publishes an annual ranking of the country’s 100 fastest-growing churches, based on numbers provided by the churches.
But studies show megachurches grow mostly through taking members from smaller churches, not from turning unbelievers into believers.
“Megachurches are sucking up folks from other denominations,” according to religion demographer Ryan Burge. “They aren’t adding water to the bathtub. They are just swirling it around a bit.”
One major unanswered question about church growth and decline in America is how many people are attending independent nondenominational churches. Many of these churches claim to be growing, but no one has accurate data about this diverse movement.
Thomas isn’t the only one promoting false claims of evangelical church growth. Focus on the Family says reports of evangelical church decline are a “myth” promoted by liberals. Focus claims “liberal churches are hemorrhaging members” while “biblical churches are holding strong,” growing or even exploding.
“Despite what you may hear, conservative, evangelical churches are, in fact, growing,” Focus said last year.
“One major unanswered question about church growth and decline in America is how many people are attending independent nondenominational churches. … No one has accurate data about this diverse movement.”
The claim that liberal churches are dying while evangelical churches are growing was true half a century ago as seen in a much-read and -discussed 1972 book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion, by Dean Kelley, a scholar with the Mainline Protestant National Council of Churches.
But the claim already was false by 2019, when Focus on the Family author Glenn Stanton published The Myth of the Dying Church: How Christianity is Actually Thriving in America and the World. The book’s outdated claims were promoted by conservative media outlets.
In one 2019 podcast, Stanton claimed the growth of megachurches proves claims of evangelical vitality, saying, “Megachurches do not happen in an atmosphere of a declining church. They just simply don’t.”
In his recent column, Cal Thomas made his claim about evangelical churches growing as part of a bigger argument about church growth and church decline in a capitalist, consumer-driven society. “Heresy is a bad ‘business model’ for the church,” he wrote.
“To put things on a secular level, most businesses that lose customers would change their way of doing business to win them back. Not the Methodists, Episcopalians, United Presbyterians, and a branch of Lutherans among others,” he said. “They are doubling down. Strongly evangelical churches that believe and preach Scripture are growing. Martin Luther said: ‘Peace if possible, truth at all costs.’ If we can’t agree on truth, then anything goes.”
The Institute on Religion and Democracy has contrasted Mainline decline with evangelical growth for decades. In a 2021 post, IRD tried to take a more balanced approach: “Today all liberal denominations in America are fast declining. Some conservative denominations are also declining. But some denominations are growing, and they are all conservative. So too are nondenominational churches, which are the fastest growing part of Christianity in America.”
But the two denominations IRD said were growing — the Assemblies of God and the Wesleyan Church in North America — aren’t growing now, and one of them clearly wasn’t growing then.
By the time IRD published its 2021 post, the Assemblies already was in decline from its 2019 peak, as explained above.
IRD’s claims about growth in The Wesleyan Church in North America relied on a 2015 report about a weekend worship attendance record of 234,427 people attending 1,680 churches. Current denominational statistics show a growth of 673 worshippers in nine years. There are now 235,100 worshippers in 1,557 churches, including 30 new church plants.
Related articles:
Focus on the Family falsely says only liberal churches are declining
I asked people why they’re leaving Christianity, and here’s what I heard | Analysis by Brandon Flanery
These Christians are leaving behind the church, but not their faith | Analysis by Mallory Challis
Why I’m leaving my church: A theology of death | Opinion by Keith Hovey
The costly victory of evangelicals and Catholics | Analysis by Rodney Kennedy