Yearbook statistics leave 13,000 people missing

Membership statistics suggest membership decline but denominational growth

by Kevin C. Vande Streek, Contributing Editor

Will you and I attend more funeral services than baptisms?

According to the CRC Yearbook, the answer is 'Probably not.' Over the past 10 years the CRC has had 35,884 covenant children baptized, compared to 18,084 deaths — nearly twice as many baptisms as deaths.

As a denomination, the CRC is growing through its children. As future pastors, we wrestle with questions of how to live well, how to die well, and so forth, but not necessarily with the question of whether or not our denomination is in decline. Except, of course, when we look at the unsettling statistic of “Total members” for the CRCNA. In 1996, the CRC had 285,864 members. Last year, the CRC reported that it only had 272,127 members.

Is this really a decline of more than 13,000 members? How can that be?

Systematic Theology professor Lyle Bierma and a group of student students proposed that the CRC has lost a number of members to the United Reformed Church, a denomination that was founded by splitting from the CRC in the mid 1990s. They speculated that this is the reason for the statistical decline.

The CRC Yearbook does have categories of “Professing and non-professing members received from other denominations” and “Professing and non-professing members that left for other denominations.” It seems simple: look at these categories and find the overall growth or decline of the denomination. When I added up these categories over the past 10 years, I found some truth to the speculation that the CRC has lost a large number of members to other denominations.

Over the past 10 years, the CRC has gained 32,483 professing and non-professing members from other denominations. In that same time the CRC has lost 44,813 professing and non-professing members to other denominations. That’s a net loss of 12,330 people. This is hard evidence that a denominational split led to a decline in the CRC — so much so that current membership is at 272,127 members.

However, there is a wrinkle in this truth: Three categories fall under the umbrella of the larger category of 'additions.' Along with the aforementioned categories of 'members who joined from other denominations' and 'covenant children baptized' is the category of 'professing and non-professing members received through evangelism.' These three categories (joiners, baptisms, and evangelisms) are added together to form the category of Additions.'

Conversely, there are three categories that make up the umbrella category called 'Declines:' the aforementioned categories of members who have left for other denominations and death, as well as a category called revisions. Add these three categories together (leavers, deaths, revisions) and that is the total number of declines.

The CRC yearbook records the net growth of the denomination by subtracting the category of declines from the category of additions. Simple enough.

In 1996, the CRC had an overall positive growth of 71 members. In 1997, 1998 and 1999 the CRC had negative growth, losing 139, 209 and 59 members respectively, and so on and so forth. Instead of giving you all the positive and negative growth statistics over the past 10 years, I’ll simply subtract the total negative growth over the last 10 years from the total positive growth over that same time. Doing this, we determine that the CRC has had a positive growth of 10,598 members since 1997.

This is confusing. These statistics show an overall growth in the CRC. But as mentioned above, the CRC Yearbook says that the overall number of CRC members is currently down over 13,000 members from 1997, when the number was 285,864 members.

What’s even more confusing are the statistics from the 2004, 2005 and 2006 Yearbooks. In 2004 there were 275,708 members. In 2005 the denomination is recorded as having a positive growth of 4,013 members, yet the statistic for members is listed as 273,220 people, over 2,000 less people than the previous year! Then, in 2006, the net growth of the denomination was 4,599 members, but the overall number of members was 272,127. How can the CRC Yearbook say that there is a gain of nearly 9,000 members in two years, and also say that there is a drop in CRC membership by 3,000 people? Somewhere, it seems, there are statistical wires that have been crossed.

Why is it important to look at all this stuff? Because it can lead to more important questions and information about our denomination, and cause us to wonder how we will pastor this denomination in the future.

A quick recap: The CRC has nearly twice as many baptisms as deaths, so it isn’t declining in that way. While there was a large and unfortunate exodus of people to different denominations in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that number was swallowed up by the total number of additions to the church. The discrepancies in the statistics lead to questions about how they are kept, formulated and recorded, or in the case that we have misinterpretted the data, how it is represented in the Yearbook.

All of these questions about the statistics are really pointing to a bigger question that remains unanswered: Is the CRCNA dwindling or growing?

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