Nationwide, many churches
see gains in giving and membership
___By Kevin Eckstrom
___Religion News Service
___NEW YORK CITY (RNS)--Americans are giving slightly more money to their churches, and several denominations have steadied declining membership rolls, according to the latest figures released Feb. 16 by the National Council of Churches.
___In the NCC's 2001 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches--the most comprehensive gathering of church statistics--the Roman Catholic Church continues to lead, with 62 million members, four times larger than the second-largest denomination, the 15.8-million-member Southern Baptist Convention.
___Several mainline Protestant denominations continue to lose members, but the rate of decline has leveled off and grown into a more natural pattern of gains and losses, said Yearbook editor and NCC Deputy General Secretary Eileen Lindner.
___"The decline of membership of the old 'mainline' churches appears to have slowed in the case of the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA), while accelerating somewhat for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America," Lindner wrote in the 2001 Yearbook.
___Lindner also pointed to the growth of fundamentalist and Pentecostal denominations, with two of them--the Baptist Bible Fellowship International and the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, with a combined membership of 2.7 million--breaking into the nation's 25 largest churches.
___Looking at the numbers, Lindner said the growth of these two denominations is probably due to better record keeping by the churches and a membership that is generally younger than the graying mainline churches.
___The bulk of U.S. and Candadian churches saw membership gains or losses within a margin of about 1 percent, down from membership losses as high as 3 percent or 4 percent a decade ago.
___Catholics saw a 0.6 percent increase, and Southern Baptists grew by 0.7 precent. The highest growth was recorded by a Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God, which grew 1.9 percent.
___Total church giving in 1999 was $26.9 billion, up from $26.2 billion in 1998. Of that $26.9 billion, nearly $4.2 billion went to benevolences--funds that are used for anything beyond the day-to-day expenses of the local church. The remaining money went to support the operations of the churches.
___Lindner said she was encouraged that benevolences increased nearly $20 per person in 1999. The percentage of total giving allotted to benevolences rose from 15 percent to 16 percent in 1999. More people of all incomes--not just the wealthy --are funding benevolences through their churches, Lindner noted.
___Church membership figures are notoriously hard to nail down, but Lindner said the new numbers are probably the most reliable, even if the numbers are slightly inflated when they are reported from the churches.
___"Are they inflated a bit? Probably. But not because someone is dishonest. Any errors ... probably are methodological. I think they are pretty good numbers," she said.
___The 10 largest churches in the United States are:
___ Roman Catholic Church, 62 million.
___ Southern Baptist Convention, 15.85 million.
___ United Methodist Church, 8.37 million.
___ Church of God in Christ, 5.49 million.
___ Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 5.14 million.
___ Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), 5.11 million.
___ Presbyterian Church (USA), 3.56 million.
___ National Baptist Convention of America, 3.5 million.
___ Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, 2.58 million.
___ Assemblies of God, 2.57 million.
The Baptist Standard
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