We're Number 10

Just noticed that the Nation­al Coun­cil of Church’s 2009 Year­book was recent­ly pub­lished (found via MMI). Here are the stats on the 10 largest reli­gious groups in Amer­i­ca.

1. The Roman Catholic Church, 67,117,06 mem­bers, down 0.59 per­cent.
2. The South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, 16,266,920 mem­bers, down 0.24 per­cent.
3. The Unit­ed Methodist Church, 7,931,733 mem­bers, down 0.80 per­cent.
4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, 5,873,408 mem­bers, up 1.63 per­cent.
5. The Church of God in Christ, 5,499,875 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
6. Nation­al Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, U.S.A., Inc., 5,000,000 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
7. Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church in Amer­i­ca, 4,709,956 mem­bers, down 1.35 per­cent.
8. Nation­al Bap­tist Con­ven­tion of Amer­i­ca, Inc., 3,500,000 mem­bers, no change report­ed.
9. Pres­by­ter­ian Church (USA), 2,941,412 mem­bers, down 2.79 per­cent
10. Assem­blies of God, 2,863,265 mem­bers, up 0.96 per­cent. dan­ger­ous beau­ty divx online blue­toes the christ­mas elf movie down­load down­load home­ward bound ii lost in san fran­cis­co online

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So.… yeah. We’re num­ber 10, we’re num­ber 10, we’re num­ber 10! Maybe we can chant that at Gen­er­al Coun­cil.

Sad­ly, we’re the only Chris­t­ian group (in the top 10) that is grow­ing. And even sad­der, when you get into our inter­nal num­bers you real­ize that a few parts of our move­ment are grow­ing rapid­ly but that there are huge swaths under­go­ing slow decline. For now, the explo­sive growth is off­set­ting the decay.

I’m grate­ful that I’m on a win­ning team and that our move­ment is grow­ing when so many are stag­nat­ing, but I must con­fess that a 0.96% growth rate is not exact­ly the sort of thing that stirs the pulse.

We need divine­ly-sparked revival to which we must respond with orga­ni­za­tion­al renew­al, or else we’ll soon be cel­e­brat­ing the fact that we shrunk least.

But hey — for now I’ve got a handy fact I can share with peo­ple who say, “The Assem­blies of God? Nev­er heard of it.” I can now shoot back, “Hey — we’re almost as large as the Pres­by­te­ri­ans. Near­ly. We’re only off by like 80,000 peo­ple. That’s the size of a good South Amer­i­can church. We haven’t quite fig­ured out how to do that in North Amer­i­ca, but it can’t be that hard. So we’re basi­cal­ly one mis­si­o­log­i­cal insight and then one good church plant away from being num­ber 9. So there.”