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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Trying to add color to a graying church Andrew C. Thompson, Jun 17, 2009
Andrew Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
The United Methodist Church is an “aging” denomination.
That’s no surprise to anyone who’s spent much time in our local churches. As the heads in the pews grow grayer, there just aren’t enough youth and young adults coming up to take their places.
We need a plan to bring new generations to Christ through our ministries. But before we can formulate that plan, we also need data to grasp the nature and extent of the problem.
The Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., is helping to provide that data through its new report on church membership aging trends in the UMC (see http://www.churchleadership.com/research/deathrates.html).
Lovett Weems and his staff at the Center have already offered the church an invaluable service through their reports on clergy age trends in 2006 and in 2008. Those reports tracked the gradual aging of pastors in the UMC (average age: 51.5 years old) and created a stir by pointing out the shockingly low numbers of under-35 year old clergy across the connection (just 5 percent of the total).
Their new project attempts to do something similar. But instead of tracking the aging of our 17,000 pastors, Dr. Weems and his staff wanted to get a handle on the aging of the denomination’s 7.9 million members in the United States.
That’s a bit tricky, because the UMC doesn’t track ages of all of its members. So the Lewis Center hit on a creative solution. They decided to compare the death rates between the membership of the church and the larger U.S. population. And since most people die after the age of 65, that provides an approximate comparison between the two that can give us an idea about how the church’s membership stacks up against the broader population with respect to aging.
Put simply, if we’re aging at a faster rate than the overall population, that should be a pretty good indicator that the church is getting older (and correspondingly, failing to attract younger members). Studying the geographic aging patterns in connection with annual conferences can also let us know where the church is youngest and where it is oldest.
The report shows “areas of relative ‘youthfulness’ within a denomination that is generally aging”—mostly in the Southeastern and South Central jurisdictions. Seven conferences in those jurisdictions have significantly lower death rates than the general population.
On the other hand, the church appears to be aging most rapidly in the Western, North Central and (to a somewhat lesser degree) Northeastern jurisdictions.
Dr. Weems wants the Lewis Center to help the UMC reach “more people, more young people and more diverse people.” So the report suggests trying to reach new populations that are not strongly represented in the UMC—particularly immigrants and ethnic minorities. It also advocates increasing worship attendance and planting new churches, since those activities are associated with the presence of younger people within congregations.
I think the church should also study differences between conferences based on the data. For instance, the North Georgia Conference has a death rate 40 percent lower than the U.S. population, suggesting a fairly young membership. The California-Pacific Conference, on the other hand, has a death rate 50 percent higher.
“So what is going on in North Georgia that isn’t happening in Cal-Pac? Are there theological differences at work? A different approach to mission and evangelism? Do the churches in Georgia offer a way of discipleship that is lacking in other places?
“When we start to make those comparisons—both between jurisdictions and between annual conferences within the same jurisdiction—then we can begin to see what kind of ministry bears real fruit in bringing youth and young adults into the church.”
Andrew Thompson
