The National Council of Churches will publish it’s 2008 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches both in hardcopy and on-line in March.
This has become an essential reference to understand the trends and patterns of religious life in these two countries. The NCCC says the Yearbook is “the most up-to-date compilation of contacts, facts and figures on US and Canadian churches and church agencies.”
WNET’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly provided brief highlights of the membership figures:
…meanwhile, new figures on American church membership. in the national council of churches annual survey, Jehovah’s Witness’s reported more than one million members and a growth of 2.25% in 2006– the largest percentage increase of any denomination. the Episcopal Church had the largest percentage decrease, more than 4% to roughly 2.1 million members. The largest denominations remain the Catholic Church with 67.5 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention with more than 16 million, and the United Methodist Church with close to eight million.
Meanwhile, a major new survey on religious membership is expected from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life some time this week. “Based on interviews conducted in English and Spanish with a representative sample of over 35,000 adults, the survey includes detailed information on religious affiliation and provides estimates of the size of religious groups that are as small as three-tenths of 1 percent of the adult population.”
Parsing and interpreting this new data should keep bloggers, pundits, journalists and denominational executives busy for a while. When the Survey is released, we’ll tell you about it here.