Apparently a number of churches in the Presbyterian USA denomination are slowly bleeding out. While the denomination does have some godly pastors and churches that still believe the Bible and preach the gospel without wincing and apologizing, things don't look good overall.

According to the guys with calculators at the denomination's headquarters, membership loss for the denomination in 2005 was estimated at sixty-five thousand, followed by an eighty-five thousand projected loss in 2006. According to The Layman Online, "Both the projected losses in members in 2005 and 2006 would be higher than any prior year's downturn since the reunion of the northern and southern streams of the mainline denomination in 1983. The projected 2006 loss would represent a single-year decline of 3.7 percent, the highest percentage loss in the denomination's 216-year history."

Curiously, no explanation was given for the continued decline of the denomination. Perhaps that is because such an explanation would require repentance for getting off track of the mission of the gospel to fight over such things as homosexuality and feminism. These cancers are eating away at many liberal denominations and are now spreading to younger emerging-type Christian networks caught driving around the same moral and theological cul-de-sacs that a previous generation wasted their life on while failing to do evangelism and plant churches.

While the truth will be received by some as warmly as water on a cat, the stats bear out that churches with a high view of Scripture, a high view of Jesus, and an ongoing call for people to repent of personal sin and trust in Jesus tend to grow while their counterparts do not. Why? Because there is power in the gospel, and the church has no power when it walks away from the gospel. As the PC-USA is discovering, churches marrying the spirit of the age instead of Jesus end up being widowed. The only hope is repentance, which is the key to all of the Christian life, and not merely another year of stats without an explanation, repentance, and a renewed sense of mission.

According to Lyle Schaller in The Very Large Church, there are multiple variables that help churches grow. The following eight variables are some of the most pertinent in light of this discussion:

1. Larger churches tend to have higher expectations for their members' active participation than smaller churches.
2. Larger churches tend to be more conservative in theology and more liberal in practice, while smaller churches are often more liberal in theology and more conservative in outward practice (e.g., liturgy, hymns, and vestments).
3. Larger churches tend to be non-denominational and function as independent churches or as members of loosely affiliated networks.
4. Larger churches tend to present clear, authoritative teaching from Scripture while theological pluralism tends to thrive in smaller churches.
5. Larger churches are governed more by local leadership in the church while smaller churches often rely more on regional or national leadership for their direction.
6. Larger churches tend to have a smaller number of leaders making decisions while smaller churches are either in theory or practice more committee and congregationally governed.
7. Larger churches tend to listen to a small and influential number of church members for direction while smaller churches tend to give ear to most everyone.
8. Larger churches tend to hire more from within while smaller churches often hire from the outside and often depend upon schools and denominations to replace their pastor(s).

In conclusion, the way out of this sort of mess calls for theologically conservative Bible teaching, real church members actively doing ministry, drifting from national denomination leadership to more local authority, raising up pastors from within, and ignoring the parade of fools who will shrill at such changes.