Back when I was in seminary, some wise old souls of the church taught that one of the primary markers of a spiritually unhealthy congregation is a fundamental dissonance between the story they tell the world about themselves and the actuality of their lives.
A church that claims to be one thing, when in reality it's not that at all? That's a church that doesn't understand itself, and that has lost its way. The church that says "we're a family," but when you spend any time there, you realize the only way that's true is if you're talking about the Manson Family. The church that says "we're welcoming," but offers up only cold silence and a circle of backs to visitors at the fellowship hour. The church that says, "we're inclusive," but by that means only that they're as open-minded as a doctrinaire Maoist, or the church that says," we're bible-believing," by which they mean they've created zealous rationalizations for ignoring 93.2% of Christ's teachings in favor of a cultish theofascism.
Sure, no church is perfect, and sometimes the story we tell about ourselves is aspirational. We say not who we are, but who we yearn to become, that we might by declaring it over and over become that thing. Recovery works that way, for example. And when we look to ourselves, we carefully curate our observations to show only those things that affirm that ideal self image.
If that drives us to become the community that God is calling us to be, then it's a blessing. If that so masks the reality of who we are that we're functionally delusional, then nothing we do will be grounded in reality, and we will fail. This is true for persons and communities, churches and nations.
As a Presbyterian, I wonder at this often, as I watch my denomination to continue to shrink. The latest data on that decline was shared recently, as the research wing of the PC(USA) offered up their annual snapshot of where we are.
Where we are is getting smaller at a slightly slower rate, which is what passes for good news these days. Total membership shrank by 2.6% in 2025, with just under 27,000 fewer Presbyterians year over year. One hundred twenty-seven congregations closed last year. Nearly 70% of PC(USA) churches are officially now small churches, meaning they've got fewer than 100 members.
There was another familiar stat presented, one that was of particular interest. As the article in Presbyterian Outlook stated:
The distribution of members among the denomination’s congregations continues to show that small congregations make up the bulk of churches, but most Presbyterians belong to larger congregations.
And then we got the following handy dandy little low-res chart:
I don't question that it's an accurate representation of congregational membership rolls and size distribution. As far as the denomination is concerned, the membership roll is the number that matters. Per capita is what butters the bread, eh? Fair enough, but there's a potent little caveat to these numbers.
Here, I recall what the congregational researchers I've read over the years had to say about membership rolls and congregational size.
Membership rolls are a notoriously unreliable measure of the true size of a congregation. As a metric, they're filled with clutter and debris, with "members" whose engagement is marginal at best. Kids who moved away. Families that attend once a quarter. Dear old friends who do come enough that you can't bear to boot 'em from the list. Showing up every other year still counts as a member, right? I mean, to my small church pastoral heart it does. I'm always delighted when someone I care about whose presence I miss walks through those church doors.
If you want a better sense of the church incarnate, though, you look at worship attendance. How many souls regularly and materially engage in the core unifying event of that congregation?
That's the reality of the thing, the essence of who participates and who does not. And that number is lower, typically tracking at around thirty nine percent of total membership, with higher participation in smaller membership churches, and lower participation in higher membership churches.
If we sized congregations by attendance, things would look different. The whole chart would reweight itself nontrivially upward. A majority would still attend larger program-sized and corporate-scale communities, undoubtedly, but that majority would look less like a clear supermajority. I don't have access to the data, but if I did?
We are, I believe, smaller than we think we are.
There is nothing in the world wrong with that.
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