From: cctr114@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz (Bill Rea)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Christianity in Decline?
Date: 6 Jan 93 07:26:00 GMT
Organization: University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Is Christianity Really Declining?
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While away at my brother-in-law's over Christmas I had a chance to look
through the thesis he recently presented for his M.Th.. I hope I'm not
breaking any rules by discussing its contents but I thought it might be
of some interest to s.r.c readers. The subject matter was Christian
religious observance in New Zealand and attempted to get behind the
census figures and try to find out what was happening in New Zealand
within the Christian church in terms of who attends, how often, which
churches are growing, which are declining and why. Below is a bit of
a summary (from memory) plus some of my thoughts and comments thrown
in along the way.

Many observers of religion in New Zealand have claimed that personal
religious observance has been in decline for many years. The thesis
showed that this ``observation'' was not backed up by the evidence.
While comparisons are very difficult across a century, the thesis
claims that the same proportion of people attend church today as did
last century. What has been seen as a decline in the Christian church
by the other religious commentators has actually been a change in the
denominations and types of churches attended. All of the major
denominations such as Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodists, Presbyterian,
Church of Christ have experienced declines, some very significantly. 
This decline is both in total numbers and proportion of the population. A
few, such as Baptists and Brethren have had static attendances or
proportions of the population. The really big gains have been in the 
Pentecostal churches.

It was suggested that the reason people had seen the Christian church as
being in decline was a result of their failure to take seriously the
Pentecostal churches. They are in fact the largest single grouping within
the Christian church in New Zealand. They are also experiencing large
growth rates. One measure used in the thesis was the percentage of members
attending the largest (usually morning) service of the day, averaged
over a year. For some Pentecostal churches, which had a formal membership, 
this figure was as high as 137%. This means lots of non-members were present.
By contrast, none of the declining churches had attendance rates above 30%. 
The static churches had attendance rates of 30-50%.

One thing I was interested to see was some statistics on the ratios of
men and women in the Church. Most of the declining and static churches
had about 55% women and 45% men. The growing churches had only a slightly
higher proportion of women, as a general rule.

There were also some statistics on movements between churches. This was
interesting because the growing churches are often accused of being
``sheep stealers''. But it turned out that of all changes of denominations
only about 10% were from non-pentecostal to pentecostal churches. The
vast majority of changes were between the other protestant churches with
little movement to or from the catholics.

One of the sections I was interested in was an attempt to analyse why
the declining churches were in the state they were in. Two main reasons
were put forward. Ecumenical activities, and ``liberal Christianity''.
The biggest declines were experienced by those churches which had been
involved in the ecumenical negotiations for union of their denominations.
People perceived this as meaning they were willing to compromise their
distinctive brand of Christianity, hence it was perceived as having
little worth. Denominations afflicted with press coverage of their
more liberal clergy fared badly as well. The Presbyterian church here
had a heresy trial in the 60's over Lloyd Geering, who espoused the
usual line of liberal thinkers, the virgin birth was myth, no bodily
resurrection, Jesus wasn't God incarnate, and so on. The general public
perceives this as meaning the church no longer believes its own message.
To U.S. readers, it seems to me that your Bishop Spong espouses a similar
message to Lloyd Geering. I would be surprised if he has any greater success
than Geering. Geering as been one of the biggest proponents of the
``Christianity is in decline'' idea. Perhaps some of it is of his own
making.

I was somewhat amused at some of the quotes he had in the thesis. One of
the liberal Presbyterian clergy was recorded as lamenting ``All the wrong
churches are growing''. But in actual fact the growing churches are merely
doing what religions are supposed to do, giving meaning to life now and
providing a hope for the future. People don't convert into liberal forms of
Christianity in large numbers because it really only appeals to people with
a with a long background within Christianity who longer find the simple
faith of the conservatives satisfying. If there is a weakness in the church
it is that there is no easy road which will take a person who has come to
the end of their growth within Pentecostalism/Conservative Evangelicalism
over into the other churches.

It seems to me that much of what has been perceived as a decline in
Christianity is actually the fact that those who are not Christians
are starting to act more in accordance with their non-Christian 
beliefs. The erosion of moral values, the break up of the family,
seven day a week work and so on is a result of non-Christians finally
casting off Christian values. Also I don't think anyone realised how
big the Pentecostals were. They are mostly independent congregations with
few organised denominations and few own their own buildings. They don't
have the visible structures associated with ``the churches''. Even with
in the Elim denomination, which I am a member of, our largest congregation
meets in a school hall and has no plans to buy or build a building for
its meetings. On census forms they often only put Christian or objected
to state their religion. In the past it had been assumed that these
``Christians'' were not church attending people, this study found that
about 75% of those identifying themselves as only christian on the 
census forms were in the highest church attendence catagory (more than
30 times a year). Also it had been assumed that those who objected to
state their religion were raving atheists, but it now seems that a lot
of them are fundmentalists worried about the mark of the beast coming to
get them.

Its hard to summarize a 280 page document in a few paragraphs, but I found
it quite interesting, very different from what we had been lead to beleive
and encouraging. The one thing that bothered me about the study, and we will
have to wait until further studies are done to see if my concerns are
well founded, was the fact that only roughly two thirds of the people bothered
to fill out the survey and return it. My suspicion is that those who didn't
fill it out will be disproportionately non-Christians. But even if this is
the case, the decline in Christianity will be nowhere near what commentators
have claimed.

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                                                                     ___
Bill Rea                                                            (o o)
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