David Ewart

United Church of Canada People Trends - 2009 - Reflections

"These are Jeremiah days. The change that is coming will be more like the experience of exile than the Reformation."

When I charted the United Church data for the first time a year ago, my jaw dropped. And when I used Excel to forecast where we'd be on our 100th Anniversary in 2025, my heart sank.

Suddenly, sadly, the past 35 years of ministry began to make sense. What I knew in my bones was actually true:

The number of people coming to church was in steep decline. And there was no sign that they were ever coming back. And they weren't particularly troubled by that.
   
AND.
   
It wasn't just us. In fact, it wasn't just churches. Churches of all kinds are having the same experience; including all kinds of other volunteer organizations.

Now, it is true that everywhere you go, there are some congregations that are doing very well - including United Church congregations. And good on them. But overall, attendance is in steep decline, and for every church that is doing well, there will be 6 or 7 that are struggling and 2 or 3 that are closing because there just are not enough people going to church for all 10 to do well.

What do I mean by steep decline? 86% over the next 15 years. That's the forecast. Because over the past 10 years, we already actually have 100,000 fewer people coming to church each week.

And it's not just worship attendance. Here's what's forecast:

• Sunday School membership declines by 69%.
• New Members by profession of faith disappear altogether.
• Identified Givers to the Mission and Service Fund decline by 74%.
• Givers to Local Expenses by 52%.

And what we are living through is not like the Reformation where the church changed but society as a whole continued to be Christian, either Re-formed or Catholic.

What we are living through is more like the Exile where the people wondered how to sing the Lord's song in such a strange land. Only problem is, unlike the Exile, the "strange" land is our home. We can't even long for a place to return to.

The forecast says that the United Church cannot, and will not, exist in its present form 15 years from now.

Problem is, our present form has demonstrated remarkable tenacity and high resistance to change.

Problem is, evolution makes clear that organisms that don't change their forms in response to changed environments die.

Problem is, not all parts of the church feel the stress, and we keep believing this is a problem that can fixed instead of an irreversible change that can only be responded to:

Even if only 1 in 10 people continue to attend church, how can we change so that we will still be there as church for them?

That is a question that each congregation CANNOT address on its own.

Do we have the courage to die to all that we have separately known and loved, in order to be the church for those yet to be born?

In spite of all the evidence to the contrary - so far - I continue to believe that the adventuresome hearts that once left the loved familiar for the desired unknown still beat, and will rise to the challenge of the days ahead.

Click here to read, download, print, or email an Adobe PDF version of the full 18 pages of charts, United Church of Canada People Trends - 2009 based on the latest national statistics.

David Ewart,
www.davidewart.ca

United Church of Canada People Trends - 2009

 Click here to download, print, or email an Adobe PDF copy of the complete 18 page report, United Church of Canada People Trends - 2009. Below is the first page of this report.

Note: After a good nights sleep and some second thoughts, I noticed and corrected a few typos. I also found an error in a formula, and went back and revised the 2008 functions so that they give a fairer comparison to the new 2009 data. All these changes have been incorporated into the document you can download as of Jan 13, 2011, 3:10PM PST.

The following charts show the history up to 2009 of selected United Church of Canada data, and, based on the previous 10 years of data (2000-2009), projects what the data might be in 2025.

The chart below gives the actual data for 2008 and 2009, and compares the actual results for 2009 with the forecast.

 

In all cases the data declined from 2008 to 2009, and the 2009 actual results were less than the forecast with the notable exceptions of: Pastoral Charges, Baptisms; Sunday School Membership; and Through-the-Week Membership.

Note: For 2009, the ten years of data were examined using the LINEST and LOGEST functions of Microsoft Excel. If LINEST returned the highest coefficient of determination, r², then the straight line TREND function was used to project future values. If LOGEST returned the highest r² value, then the exponential GROWTH function was used. In all cases the r² values were higher than 0.96. And in all cases, the compared r2 values did not differ by more than 0.014. The r² values are noted for each chart. (For the non-statisticians among us, r² is a measure of “reliability.” It provides a measure of how well future outcomes are likely to be predicted. Generally speaking, if the r² value is greater than 95 than the result is considered valid.)

As a result of this process, the GROWTH function was chosen for Pastoral Charges, Baptisms (Children, Adults, and Total), Marriages, and Sunday School Membership. This resulted in changing the previous 2025 forecast of Zero. And to provide a fairer comparison between 2008 and 2009, the forecasts from 2008 were revised using the same functions.

New for 2009 is the inclusion of data for Adult Baptisms, and Identifiable Givers for both Local Expenses and the M&S Fund. While the forecasted declines are serious for all items, the 74% decline for M&S Givers is especially notable.