Church of Christ statistics

In case you are new here, I attend a church of Christ congregation with my family. My husband is the only one of them who knows I am an atheist.  We don't talk about it because it upsets him. Recently, over on the Patheos blog Roll To Disbelieve, there has been a conversation about the decline in Christianity. I got curious and did some simple research on the churches of Christ in the United States.

This article in the Christian Chronicle, a church of Christ newspaper, gives an historical overview up to 2009. The statistics are routinely compiled by 21st Century Christian, a Church of Christ publishing company: https://christianchronicle.org/church-in-america-marked-by-decline/

Notice that the decline began after the peak in 2003, when it is reported that the group keeping the statistics decided to become hard-nosed and eliminate instrumental congregations from the ranks. This would not fully account for the decline in the number of congregations, but maybe a large number of attendees, because a few of the rare mega churches in the denomination are instrumental. Even when only non-instrumental congregations were counted, the numbers were still creeping down through to 2009, as shown in the article. 

According to an addendum to the article, in 2012, the decision to dismiss instrumental churches from the ranks was reversed. However that reversal was obviously not permanent. The 2018 report includes only a cappella congregations. That is found here: https://www.21stcc.com/pdfs/ccusa_stats_sheet.pdf

After reviewing the statistics freely available, I have found that number of counted congregations has shrunk by about 9% since the 2003 peak, at an average rate of about 79 a year. The number of total members, which means baptized believers on the rolls, has decreased by about 12% over the last 15 years. The number of total adherents on the congregations' rolls, which includes non baptized children, has also decreased by about 13%. 

The average attendance over just the last three years, state by state on this document, https://www.21stcc.com/pdfs/PDF_Sample_1.pdf   has decreased by as low as 3% in bible belt areas to up to 8% in places like California and Colorado. The attendance in Maine was down 15%, but its churches are historically small. 

These numbers seem to show that most of the gains since 1980 have been lost. If this trend continues, in another decade church of Christ numbers could approach the levels seen about 1950. I have no doubts at all that this decline is due to the effects of the expansion of the internet, the effects of social media, and the politicization of religion.

(I previously commented about these statistics on the Roll to Disbelieve blog.This post is a cleaned up version.)