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The Reading Room - History
The Present State of American Presbyterianism
Introduction - Numerical Decline - Population Growth • Internal Conflicts • Conclusion - Sources
By: Dennis W. Jowers (WRS Adjunct Professor of Theology 2004)
The successes of the preceding three hundred years of Presbyterianism in America notwithstanding, the outlook for conservative, Bible-believing Presbyterianism today is quite bleak. In the following, we shall attempt to substantiate three fundamental claims. First, the growth of conservative, American, Presbyterian denominations in recent decades has failed to keep pace with the United States’ population growth. Second, such denominations, whether considered individually or as a whole, are mere pygmies when compared to the U.S. population or even the liberal-controlled Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA). Third, and perhaps most tragically, conservative Presbyterian churches are deeply divided by the so-called Auburn Avenue theology. This new theology must, on the one hand, be squelched if these churches are to maintain their historic witness; and, on the other hand, it threatens, along with other intra-Presbyterian disputes, to engulf the churches in preoccupation with internal conflicts, thus stifling renewal in the areas of evangelism and mission.
I. Numerical Decline Relative to Population Growth
The membership statistics for American denominations maintained by the Association of Religious Data Archives1 indicate that the United States’ population growth has vastly outstripped the growth of the most conservative American Presbyterian denominations. The Reformed Church in the United States, for example, between 1971 and 1998 added only 219 members to its rolls. During the same period of time, the United States added 80 million persons to its population. The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), the largest and fastest growing relatively conservative Presbyterian denomination, added 82,221 persons to its roles between 1990 and 2000; the population of the United States during the same period increased by approximately 40 million persons. One may protest that such absolute comparisons unduly exaggerate the extent of evangelistic failure on the part of conservative Presbyterian churches. They are intended, however, only to highlight the datum that conservative Presbyterian churches are failing to grow at sufficient rates even to sustain the comparatively miniscule influence for good they presently exert.
II. Numerical Insignificance Relative to Overall Population
Again, the PCA, by far the largest and most thriving somewhat conservative Presbyterian church in the United States possesses, according to its denominational website,2 approximately 306,000 “communicant and non-communicant members.” The current U.S. population is between 299 and 300 million persons. If one pooled all of the conservative Presbyterian churches, such as the members of the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council, those denominations to the right of it such as the Bible Presbyterian Church and the Heritage Netherlands Reformed Churches, and evangelical congregations that remain within the Christian Reformed Church in North America and the PCUSA, it seems one could hardly form a group of more than 600,000 or 700,000 persons, approximately one fifth of the size of the 3.5 million member PCUSA. At the most, therefore, Reformed believers and their children constitute 0.23% of the United States’ population.
Many of the most doctrinally sound Reformed congregations, moreover, are composed mainly of persons fifty years of age or older and are, therefore, barring some radical rejuvenation, slated to close in two or at most three decades. Something of a crisis mentality is, therefore, quite appropriate for Reformed believers in the present. If the Reformed faith is to play any appreciable role in America’s future religious history, the Presbyterian clergy and laity must be awakened from their complacency and emboldened to adopt a much more aggressive posture in the areas of evangelism, church-planting, and missions.
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