The Christian Century

Do people join a church because they share its members' beliefs? This has become the putative ideal, the only pure motivation for church affiliation. But I have seldom heard it voiced at our new members' class.

As the organizing pastor of a suburban congregation, I have experienced firsthand its faltering first steps, its seasons of growth and drought, and the Spirit's persistent attempts to help us identify and embrace the vision of God's own choice. Quite frankly, we've resisted the vision.

I was perilously close to becoming an agnostic—at least about certain statistics. Specifically, I really didn’t know the data on Christians in China, and for a while I was not sure if anyone did. Only now, perhaps, do we have the glimmerings of an answer to one of the most pressing questions in global religion: just how many Chinese Christians are there?

Southern Baptist Convention president Johnny Hunt has urged members of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination to move beyond their comfort zones as they seek new ways to evangelize and combat declining baptism rates.

U.S. membership in the United Methodist Church fell to 7.77 million in 2008—its biggest one-year percentage drop (1.01 percent) since 1974.

In a statistical report that likened its declining numbers to those of ecumenical Protestant denominations, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod said that its baptized membership fell in 2008 by 45,735 members to a total of 2.33 million.

Amid their “slow but general retreat” this decade in terms of financial health and membership, the oldline Protestant churches are especially hampered by the aging of their memberships, a new study says.

United Methodists in the U.S. have defeated amendments that would have made church membership open to all Christians regardless of sexual orientation and that would have moved toward allowing the U.S. church to address issues independent of the global United Methodist body.