Pastors in historically Black Protestant churches generally agree that both their influence as pastors and their churches’ influence in their communities has been declining. Although a recent Pew Research Center study explains in detail the reasons behind this issue,[1] in this post, I will focus on a single church to show how difficult and necessary…
Immigration is a major component in the changing U.S. religious landscape. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Latinx Christians increased from thirteen percent in 2007 to sixteen percent in 2014.[1] For this reason, the Religious Workforce Project includes qualitative data from eight Latinx congregations. In this post, I will introduce Iglesia Episcopal…
In Church of the Nazarene, congregations report the number of clergy serving the congregation. The clergy may be full-time, part-time, paid, unpaid, active, or retired. There has been steady growth in churches reporting more than one clergy between 2000 and 2019, from 23 percent of churches (or 1,123) in 2000 to 37 percent (or 1,851)…
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has had goals and policies in its churchwide office and synods since the late 1980s to increase racial and ethnic diversity. When the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church of America merged to form the ELCA in 1988, the leaders of the new denomination set a Constitutional goal…
Over the past several decades, the average weekly worship attendance of Christian congregations has been decreasing. In 1998, the median number of regular participants of Christian congregations in the United States was 80 people[1], and by 2018-19 this had dropped to 70 participants for the average congregation[2]. Smaller congregations usually have fewer financial resources and…