UMC Attendance Down 40% BEFORE 2023
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- Опубліковано 12 вер 2024
- This one is for people who like spreadsheets. If you don't like spreadsheets, you will not like this one. It compares a few vital stats among all US Annual Conferences in the UMC from 2019 to 2022. The picture it paints is devastating. It is MUCH worse than losing 25% of its churches to disaffiliation. I think this data shows it is likely the denomination has lost at least 75% of its average worship attendance from 2019. Dark days.
I actually pastored a Methodist church for a few years, where the UMC had closed it after most of the congregation voted to leave. The church had dwindled to an average attendance of about 45, with 27 deciding to break away, leaving no choice to the UMC but to close it. Evidently this was before disaffiliation was allowed, they werent even concerned with keeping the property, they just wanted out, even tho the church was very historic. From what I was told, they hadnt had a real pastor for quite some time, and hadnt heard a real sermon in years. I was asked to come for what I thought would be 3 weeks til they decided what they were going to do, ended up being there for 3 years. My last Sunday there, we had 138 in attendance. I'd say that quadrupling in 3 years was a major success. When a group of Methodists were desperate enough to ask a Baptist to lead them, you know they had had enough. Lots to the story, but at the end of the day, theres absolutely no reason for all these closures except spiritual deadness, power and greed. The way I figure, even with society abandoning religion,, theres still 4 times as many people in this country as there was when the UMC was formed, meaning you could have a 75% drop in conversions within the population, and STILL grow. The challenge for the GMC is to preach the gospel with the fire of the Holy Ghost, like the Methodists of the 19th century. God will still add to his church.
Amen. May the body of Christ continue to grow no matter what name is attached. 🙏
Wise words.
Retired from my day job, happy to preach on Sunday... apply here.
Wise words and sad world.
@@robertgibson9101 Where are you located friend? Perhaps someone will see you here who needs you! Are you Methodist or other?
You are very generous to take reported attendance because my experience of moving into a new church was always that pastors before me were bad in math
IE it normally toke a year to get the number up to last years attendance
Yep. I’m clergy. Bad at math 😂😂
I'm ashamed at the clergy who simply lied on end of your reports and attendance records. We clergy have all kinds of horror stories. Like the pastor that said attendance was 150 (when only 70 attended)- he counted anyone who sent in money in the mail as "present". I also personally know a pastor who looked at the roll of a small church and saw that a previous pastor had added Jesus to the roll. We got a lot of mileage teasing the second pastor that he actually took Jesus off the roll of a UMC church!
I keep coming back to your channel to get a glimpse of what we are going to see in my denomination, the Church of the Nazarene!
The important things aside, this equals a fiscal cataclysm for the UMC.
Thank you Jesus the church where I attend left with an 83% firm vote. Buh bye North Ga.
@joer5627 honestly, I'm worried about all the Godly retired UMC pastors. If the denomination dries up, they'll be left in the cold...
I'm from West Ohio. We had 88 churches disaffiliate in 2022. I believe the West Ohio church number for the end of 2022 did not factor in those churches. As of 12/31/22, we were still UMC churches. The next day, we were not.
Weird. I will hope to reconcile that with my spreadsheet soon. ALWAYS REMEMBER my spreadsheet is a product of love, not professionalism. I do my best. It isn't good enough. Thanks for your understanding.
@@plainspokenpod No problem. I didn’t mean to imply anything negative about you. I think we will not know even partial ramifications of disaffiliation yet. Keep preaching Jesus.
Gary
The UMC is dead, period. My Church started losing attendance early on when the liberals started an indoctrination campaign to prepare the congregation for the 2024 conference acceptance of homosexual marriage and clergy. No matter what we were studying in Sunday school or topic of the sermon, it always came back to how wonderful gay marriage was. If we did not accept it, we were bad people. Our Sunday school class almost ceased to exist as a result.
What in the bible are the united about? Romans chapter 1 maybe not.
We really need to see attendance and giving from 2017-2018 or so (2016 when Oliveto got elected is when the crisis started heating up) compared with 2024 or 2025 after all disaffiliations were totally completed. That will tell the story of how much damage revisionism/theological liberalism has done to the UMC.
I can guarantee those numbers are accurate regarding NorthWest Texas. Though it could also be from small churches, sadly, dying off at the same time. Not sure how much that affected the numbers
I'm almost positive that the 2022 number of churches include the churches that disaffiliated. That's the way it was with closed churches. In their final year, they still show up as a church but the membership is zeroed out.
Jeffrey I do appreciate your viewpoint and the work you do to put out these videos..even though I don’t agree sometimes.
Could you do an overall video about UM administration/bishops/agencies and the issues traditionalists have? If you’ve already covered this pls let me know
I haven't thought of doing such a segment. But listen, I don't think conservatives/traditionalists had much of an issue with the administration or bishops or agencies. We generally liked those structures and offices. Part of the reason we got so disappointed is that these good structures were coopted to do holy warfare against us. For that reason, some of us then turned against bishops and large administration. But the problem isn't with these things; it is with what was done with them.
Generally speaking, they ask way too much money and return very little benefit to the local church. Moreover, the general boards and agencies do not represent the people on the grassroots level. They are instead disproportionately upper class, white, and liberal. Africans, lower-income folks, and conservatives are woefully underrepresented. Bishops make too much money and are dangerously wealthy. They also selectively enforced the Book of Discipline.
Maybe I could do a segment on that. It would just be an opinion piece. Now that you see the general tenor of my thoughts, do you think this would be a useful piece for me to publish?
Well... Congrats to your effort, but... It is sadly all over the place, not only UMC. To be religious, even if LIBERAL religious, is becoming sort of counter cultural these days. Few hours ago I went on my Roman Catholic Parish on a, once solidly conservative deep rural area just some 15 miles out of Holly Mother of Fátima Shrine in Portugal for the feast of the Assumption which here in the RCC is a day of obligation, just to find it was one of the less attended Masses I've ever had. We were no more than 30 on a Church that can easily to seat 400. And last Sunday it wasn't too much more: Maybe we were 35 if that... Our Church is pretty conservative and traditional worship oriented to an extent. By and large only the ones 75+ regularly go. Youngsters do leave after Catechism and they don't usually return. Some would come for brief time before they get married or they need to Baptize a kid, but rarer by the year.
I've no magic wands, but there 2 things on where I'm almost certain: Christianity as a whole didn't understand the rising on the Average Life Expectancy, the rise on the Average Academic Level, and especially the rise of instant information access one can have from their digital devices, making our days the ones when people can to do more immediate choices. And consequently Christianity will now to face the consequences. Here at my little world that means that in less than 10 years our lovely Parish will be gone. Too late to do something else to revert situation. It doesn't matter on whether the Church will to become more conservative or more liberal. If more conservative it will just to appeal for a few old money upper middle class fearful individuals that will ultimately to leave when they'd get deluded. If more liberal it will just to appeal for certain ones in the sexual minorities margins whom are by the most part naturally disinterested on religion and will ultimately to leave when they get bored. Either way, even if it was possible to join both groups, they wouldn't be enough to make a Parish sustainable, to let alone each group at a time!
In the current US context I can watch those more or less conservative Churches like your recently enacted GMC as having some immediate success within the current GOP leaning voter constituency... But gone Trump in the next 4 or 8 years if he gets elected or even now if he doesn't get elected, I believe you'll start to see the same trends we are watching everywhere even here in a relatively conservative part of Europe like my own Portugal. Today I was the 5th younger ones at Mass and I'm not that old to begin with!... Sadly, we need to somewhat accept that being a Christian will just to be sort of a "niche market" sort of spiritual affair on the not so long future than what we could to think about...
Hi, will you talk about the World Methodist Conference, from the World Methodist Council in Sweden? It's happening right now
They don’t have a live stream. I can’t discern much of what is going on…
@@plainspokenpod I understand, that's sad. One of the bishops from my Church (Methodist Church of Brazil) is there. I'll try to reach him for more information. Thanks for the reply
If you look at the UMC data now, they report total attendance as in person and online viewership added together. They also show how much of the total is from online and how much is in person. From What I've seen from many churches in Florida where I am, there are many reporting a higher attendance online than they have in person now. I anticipate the attendance numbers for 2024 and beyond will be largely inflated to make it look like the church has fully recovered from COVID and Disaffiliation, but the reality is the majority of your people are just views, and not all are actively involved or plugged in with your church. It'll be unhelpful to the churches still in the UMC to paint a picture that all is well when the reality is quite different.
I meant to talk about how they were reporting attendance. TJ and I did a segment in which we substantiated that the reporting on online views is almost entirely useless. It isn't a legitimate measurement at all.
Virginia indeed hostile leadership!
Jeffrey, this video was very difficult to follow. Could you go back, study the numbers,and give us a summary?
Nope. On to other things. I'll use the spreadsheet for more things in the future, but this segment was just me messing around with the spreadsheet first thing in the morning.
Forty per cent!😮
Yeah Jeffrey. I think you are a bit mistaken. The numbers are not predisaffiliation. In Al West Fla, 6 churches left in 2021. But of these 6, one was Frazer of Montgomery with like 3,000-5,000 members.
Then, in 2022, I think about 27 churches left in November.
The big wave was 2023,
but in your numbers in this video, over 30 churches in those losses between 2019 and 2023 were Disaffiliation. The rest were typical small church closures that died.
I do hope you will do this again after 2023 numbers come out.
And like you said- it’s still not over. 107 are up for a vote this Saturday in South Georgia.
I think what I said was that the vast bulk of churches disaffiliated in 2023. I didn't speak to the size of the churches. Just the number of them. Technically disaffiliation was happening from 2020 thru 2023, but the vast majority were 2023. If I said anything resembling a statement that any disaffiliations before 2023 were inconsequential, I would want to correct that, but I'm pretty sure I didn't say that. Perhaps the disaffiliations in 2022 were the larger churches like Frazer and the 2023 churches were medium and small churches. I haven't seen anyone noticing that trend. As it stands, I still think it is pretty rational to think that there was a pretty evenly-spread distribution of sizes of churches disaffiliating over the course of those years, and it is reasonable to expect that 2023 losses were larger than 2022 losses.
@@plainspokenpod I guess I misunderstood. I was thinking you were trying to make the point that (overall) the UMC was dropping large amounts of people/churches before disaffiliation got going strong (when I think disaffiliation had actually been part of that big drop). I probably misheard. Thanks for all you do.
Jeffrey, how can I obtain this spreadsheet? Thank you brother.
Send me an email with a request, and I should be able to get back to you relatively soon. plainspokenpod@gmail.com