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| WELS Pastor Steve Witte is happy to share the podium with a lady ELCA minister and a Thrivent abortion-promoting sales agent. |
The WELS BORAM reports “An analysis of WELS attendance rates demonstrates that approximately 155,000 WELS members attend less than 5 percent of the time. We estimate half of these individuals have not attended in years.” With a membership of 353,753, perhaps the WELS has a committed membership around 200,000: I recall the ELCA keeps a statistic somewhat like this.
The WELS 2017 comprehensive demographic study predicts that in 2059 the WELS membership could be 166,000 members with a net loss of 760 congregations from the current total of 1270 congregations. This WELS study is mentioned in the BORAM, in part, to encourage congregations to utilize resources the WELS has to offer its congregations. Possibly one shortcoming in this study is an apparent assumption that average congregation membership will increase over the next forty years. Instead, could we see a situation where a pastor is serving a congregation part-time while he also works a secular job?
Looking back forty years the WELS was on a membership growth trend http://www.thearda.com/denoms/D_896.asp so it seems likely that something could change the current membership decline trend for American Christian church-bodies over the next forty years. For example, Millennial-aged individuals who currently have less interest in church membership may find a different attitude in their 40s, 50s, or 60s.
Steve Ames
http://alpb.org/Forum/index.php?topic=7216.msg461801;topicseen#msg461801
ELCA's Profile
LCMS Profile
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GJ - The membership trends are fantasies known as "outside polling," quite unlike the real figures, called "inside polling" in secular politics.
LCMS-WELS-ELS-ELCA are collapsing faster than a Jenga Tower built by Angela Merkel.
The inside polling had them terrified decades ago. I heard it in the LCA in 1978, about 50 years ago. Very few children baptized in a given congregation would be there for confirmation. The rate was 50% at that time - 30 babies in my German congregation were 15 confirmands.
I give all the glory to the Church Growth aka Church and Change leaders in the LCMS-ELCA-ELS-WELS-CLC (sic). The next- to-die sects are in the tiniest font because they are so shrimpy already.
The primary problem is their adherence to the Calvinistic-Pietistic denial of Justification by Faith, the efficacy of the Word in the Means of Grace.
They have no Gospel to teach, no faith created or sustained by the Gospel Word, whether invisible in preaching and teaching, or visible in the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. The alternative is advocacy. The Left Wing beats their war drums for abortion on demand and its partner, pan-sexualism. They are sensitive about pronouns and gender words (her, his, its, womyn) but insensitive about the articles of faith.
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| Diversity is only good when it is selective. |
The supposed Right Wingers (just ELCA wannabees) venerate their sects rather than sexes. The superb management and marketing methods - which caused Fuller to shrink, Willow Creek to dry up, Mars Hill to blow up - are collapsing the Right Wing almost as fast as ELCA. Just think if the "conservatives" had Harvard-trained Liz Eaton, with that special quota system, leading them.
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| "Truth on the scaffold, error on the throne." |
