A new report released by the National Council of Churches this week showed a decrease in membership for the most orthodox of denominations, while the numbers of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists are growing. The 2011 Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches shows the Catholic Church, still the largest mainline church in the nation, experienced a one-half percent growth the previous year to 68.5 million members, but the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church, the second and third largest denominations respectively, posted declines in membership to 16.1 million and 7.8 million members. Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh-Day Adventists posted more than four percent growth each, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the fourth largest denomination) grew nearly 1.5 percent to just over 6 million members. The Yearbook’s editor, Rev. Dr. Eileen Linder, was quoted in The Christian Post as saying, “The direction of membership remains very stable…churches which have been increasing in membership in recent years continue to grow, and likewise, those churches which have been declining in recent years continue to decline.” Overall mainline church membership declined by a little over 1 percent in the past year to 145.8 million members.
