Our membership problem is
biological, not ideological

The Rev. James R. Ryan asked whether the loss of membership in our denomination was a result of The United Methodist Church taking moral stands on social issues (“How would bishops answer these questions about UMC?” March 24).
Leaders in the so-called “renewal” groups, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, Good News and the Confessing Movement, repeatedly seek to justify their attacks on the UMC by claiming that a decline in membership is the fault of “liberals” who involved the church in social action (civil rights, environmental advocacy, women’s rights and so forth), and that they have arrived just in the nick of time to save us from ourselves.
This position is illustrated by the Rev. Riley Case, a longtime board member of Good News and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, as well as associate executive director of the Confessing Movement. He recently wrote in Good News magazine that United Methodism “is in the midst of a 100-year decline. The years of the decline correspond exactly to the years that liberalism and institutionalism have dominated Methodism.”
The problem with his assertion is that it is simply not true. As we learned in school, correlation does not denote causation. The cause of the decline in membership in The United Methodist Church is biology, not ideology.
Social-scientific evidence shows that the membership decrease in mainline denominations over the past 70 years and the growth of conservative churches is the direct consequence of people dying and of conservative church members having more children than their mainline counterparts.
According to several leading experts in the sociology of religion (M. Hout, A. Greeley and M.J. Wilde), who published their findings in 2001 in a peer-reviewed journal, “switching from mainline to conservative denominations...explains none of the decline of mainline denominations” (“The demographic imperative in religious change in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology, Volume 107, Pages 468-500).
In fact, if you are born into a Southern Baptist or Pentecostal church, you are more likely to become a United Methodist or other mainline Protestant than the other way around. Furthermore, as women in conservative churches become more highly educated, they tend to marry later and have fewer children, presenting those churches with the identical demographic factors that have accounted for the decline in membership in mainline Protestantism.
We, like all United Methodist pastors, are committed to the growth of our church. And we believe that the UMC, as a spiritual descendant of the Wesleys, has much to offer to our hurting world.
Don’t be fooled by unsubstantiated allegations. As the Wesleys were deeply involved in the social issues of their day, so God calls us to respond to those of our day.
The Rev. Carolyn L. Stapleton, a Southwest Texas Conference elder, serves Chinese UMC, New York City. The Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, a member of the California-Nevada Conference, is associate publisher of Zion’s Herald.