The largest Protestant denominations

Since I live in the south it feels like there are a lot more Baptist than that:)

I think what would be helpful would be more context, rather than just the numbers and ranking. How do each denomination’s numbers compare to the past — especially in percentages? I’m pretty sure the ELCA has lost a full 50% of its membership since its inception (almost 25 years ago); the LCMS no more than 10% or 15% over the same period — which of the others have gained membership? Which have lost, and how much?

As a former United Methodist this just makes me shake my head. In 1969 the UMC was the largest Protestant denomination with over 11 million members. That means that in 40 years the denomination has lost 30% of its members (while population growth over the same period of time was significant). Unfortunately, large swaths of what remained are little more than a politically liberal PAC with a hymnal. I still have many friends in the UMC (including quite a few pastors) who are marvelous Christian people. But as a whole, it is a bureaucratic theological wasteland.

Since this data gives LC-MS at 2.3 million, I assume that’s it’s the number that the Synod herself compiles from the congregational reports. This is the number which we have usually heard because when the media want to know how many X there are, they call up the denominational head quarters and ask, ‘How many of you are there?” Outfits which inflate their numbers (such as Mormons, for whom it is notoriously difficult to get off their rolls) appear to have more people than the really do. Outfits which lowball there own numbers (like the LC-MS) appear to have fewer.

An alterative method is for a polling organization to call up a selection of the populace and ask individuals, “What religion are you?” The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life have done just this.
Please look at

religions.pewforum.org/affiliations

They have the LC-MS at 1.4 percent of the U.S. population. What they call traditional Lutherans together at 1.8% (Mormons are 1.7%, as are Jews) Baptists are at 10.8%, mainline Episcopalians are at 1.4%, and Catholics are 23.9%.
Given a US population of 300,000,000 multiplied by 0.014 (to get 1.4% if my math is right. My last math class was 9th grade geometry.) that gives us 4,200,000 people who say “I’m LC-MS.” When someone calls.
Cheer up! It’s a lot more that the 7,000 who had not bowed their knees to Baal.

“If you add up the two biggest Lutheran groups (the ELCA being #5 with 4.5 million), we’d come in at #3.”

Why add in the XXXA as a Lutheran group? In its April 2012 Response to the XXXA “Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust,” the Missouri Synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations stated, “The ELCA has now taken this step, embodying apostasy from the faith once delivered to the saints.”

On August 21, 2009, when Matthew Harrison, now LCMS President, was asked, “Is apostasy too strong a word to describe what we’ve watched over the last — better part — of the decade that culminates this afternoon in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America?”, responded, “No, it is apostasy. There’s no way around it. It gives me great pain to say that, but there’s no other word for it.”

If one adds the apostate XXXA number, one could also equivalantly toss in, in the view of the LCMS, the Mormon number or the Unitarian number.

This sort of list and supposed numbers really don’t mean a thing, It’s not the church one belongs to, it’s WHO you believe in , where you put your Faith.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
Ephesians 2:8

There is not one human being who knows ones heart, that is God’s business, HE knows. A denomination can save no one. Putting faith in numbers and someone’s supposed method of counting, dividing, and listing, is foolish.

The ELCA number is wrong. According to ELCA’s own website, they have only 4,059,785 members as of 2011. I cannot imagine that they have grown by 441,000 members in the past twelve months. By the way, that is down from a membership of 5.4 million when the ELCA was formed 25 years ago.

James Kellerman, thanks for the correction on ELCA’s original membership number. I had a pretty vivid memory of that number being around 9 million, but apparently that memory was … quite wrong. Not sure how I got that figure in my head, but then again, it was a very long time ago.

Jeff, at one time the total number of Lutherans (LCMS, ELCA, WELS, and assorted loose ends) did indeed number close to 9 million. But that was all Lutherans, not just the ELCA.

Bike Bubba, the Lutheran Church grew explosively in the United States not only in the period of 19th century immigration but also after the doors were firmly shut to immigrants (i.e., in the 1920’s through the 1960’s). In fact, in that period the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (as well as some other Lutherans) more than kept pace with the Southern Baptists, which is usually the “gold standard” when it comes to evangelism outreach. Moreover, most of the people who came from Germany were not Lutherans, but members of the Prussian Union Church. Yet it is interesting that in my neighborhood in Chicago, which was originally settled by people from Pomerania and East Prussia (the heart of the Prussian Union), the two Prussian Union churches together never came close to equaling the membership of my LCMS congregation. Lutherans don’t need to be ashamed in comparing themselves with their Baptist neighbors.

Why aren’t confessional Lutherans growing today? First, nearly every denomination is in decline, with the mainlines falling off the cliff. Second, Lutherans tend to be growing in those parts of the country that are growing. Our churches in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and the like tend to be growing just fine. Unfortunately, half of the Missouri Synod membership (and an even higher percentage of Wisconsin Synod membership) is located in the Great Lakes states, also known as the Rust Belt, one of the most moribund regions of the country. Third, we in the Missouri Synod have forgotten our urban roots. Unlike the Wisconsin Synod and especially the Norwegian Synod, we have always been a heavily urbanized denomination. Three-fourths of all Missouri Synod people today live in metropolitan areas of 100,000 or more. In 1897 more than 5% of the Missouri Synod membership lived in Chicago alone, and similar high numbers could be found in Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis, Buffalo, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Paul, etc. We still live in the big cities, just on the fringes of them (called suburbs). Consequently, we have forgotten what it means to be the church amid the poor and the hustle and bustle of the city. What’s worse, we participated in white flight and never tried to learn what authentic Lutheranism might look like in an African-American or Hispanic context. That decision alone has hurt us more than anything, for there is much in Lutheranism that resonates well with our African-American and Hispanic brothers and sisters.

A good strategy for growth might be (1.) to deal with the broader trend of secularization, admittedly no easy task, (2.) to make sure that new churches are planted in growing areas of the country so that we have a “ground level” entry there, even if it means pulling resources from our home base into other areas of the country, and (3.) to take seriously the task of being urban Christians of a diverse background (much like the very first Christians, by the way, and much like the first generations of Lutherans in the Missouri Synod, who came from so many different regions of Germany they could hardly communicate among themselves).

tODD; actually, if you read things carefully, I’m not pointing to the SBC specifically (which has its own problems of being a state church in some parts of the South), but rather to a large portion of the list that does evangelism as well or better than the SBC. (most evangelicals, charismatics, and pentacostals, and a lot of fundamentalists are in this group)

And what evidence do I have that the Lutherans still suffer from having been a state church? Well, for starters, look at your comments, and those of Mr. Kellerman. You’re not arguing that Lutherans are going out and sharing the Word with their neighbors, but rather that the statistics support what you’re doing.

It’s exactly what I’ve seen in the churches which have been officially (Lutherans, catholics, anglicans, orthodox) or unofficially (ancient Methodist, SBC) “state churches”. The assumption that the people will come simply because you’re there is a hard habit to break, and–here’s the SBC again–an easy one to get. See what I’m getting at?

Bubba (@20):

And what evidence do I have that the Lutherans still suffer from having been a state church? Well, for starters, look at your comments, and those of Mr. Kellerman. You’re not arguing that Lutherans are going out and sharing the Word with their neighbors, but rather that the statistics support what you’re doing.

That’s it? You’re arguing from what I haven’t said? That’s your evidence? In that case, I’m certain you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Because I didn’t say anything either way about what Lutherans are doing. I know from personal experience that Lutherans certainly are “going out and sharing the Word with their neighbors”, but that is of course anecdotal, and unlikely to convince someone who is relying on evidence he has pulled out of his thin air.

I would not deny that Lutherans are probably less outgoing than your average American Evangelical, but I think that your diagnosis is lacking at several levels. Some of the issue is temperamental (different churches attract different types of people, and Lutherans I have known have simply been more introverted than Baptists I have known).

But I would argue the biggest explanation is theology. Not that Lutherans don’t believe in the Great Commission, but rather that those churches that are “best” at motivating their people to get out and evangelize tend to be the ones that are heavy on the Law — and, ironically, tend to short-change the Gospel.

I grew up surrounded by Baptists, went to Baptist Bible studies, attended Campus Crusade throughout college with a bunch of Baptist(ic) students, and so on. And it was made pretty clear to me that if I were to be a true Christian, I had to go out and “witness” to people. Not because the Gospel was that amazing and inspiring, but because that’s how you prove your bona fides to the other Christians. You had to attend church weekly, you had to be involved in a Bible study, you had to have a daily “quiet time”, and you had to witness to people, preferably through contrived confrontations that were more about checking off the “witness” to-do box than they were about actually talking with anyone.

Personally, I found most of what passed as “evangelization” among Evangelicals to be pretty repugnant — and I was the one who was supposed to be engaged in it, not the target. I’m not convinced it’s actually all that effective even if people are “fired up” about it or whatever. And the SBC numbers certainly bear that out.

But, of course, you’re ignoring them now. When you said “Baptists”, you meant to exclude the overwhelmingly largest group of Baptists.

Bubba doesn’t know my congregation, this much is obvious.

I simply extra up your RSS feed to my MSN News Reader.