Chutney asks about population versus Unitarian Universalist numbers: fair enough. We’re just treading water, but sinking on a historical scale.
Since 2000, the United States has grown about 3.3%, which matches the rough 0.8-1.0% annual growth we’ve had for the last few decades.
Two sites for stats from the U.S. Census:
- www.census.gov/population/estimates/nation/popclockest.txt
- eire.census.gov/popest/data/states/tables/NST-EST2003-02.php (Cumulative Population Change by State)
So, if we had 151,557 adult members in 1961, and there were about 183,700,000 Americans (not to mention Canadians and others), and if today there are an estimated 292,451,937 Americans, why are there not hundreds of thousands more members in our fellowship?
(Larry Ladd, the UUA financial advisor has been very good about tracking numbers. See the PDF file at www.uua.org/TRUS/financial/FARep10-03.pdf. Download these statistics in PDF, too)
Sorry to be pedantic, but after scouring the UUA website for evidence that we can say the E word, I feel justifed in saying we still have a block around evangelism.
But me a drink and I’ll tell you why . . . .
Just about everybody has a block on evangelism, unfortunately, except the evangelicals. In my church, the ELCA, there’s admirable stuff being done at the national and synodical level to encourage people to bring our faith to those around us, but dyed-in-the-wool German and Scandinavian Lutherans are hard to turn around. I have no doubt dyed-in-the-wool Universalists are the same way. 😉
I think that for all the bad the God Gulf years are bringing us, we’re also seeing a willingness on the part of the guiltily spiritual to come out of the woodwork and start talking about faith. We need to do all we can to encourage that trend and let people know that it’s not only the fundamentalists who are driven by their religious beliefs.