Religious Congregations & Membership: 2000

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Methodology
A brief overview by Richard Houseal, RCMS Liaison for Data Collection. For more detail, please see the Introduction and Appendices sections found in Religious Congregations & Membership in the United States: 2000.

Religious Congregations & Membership presents data reported by 149 religious bodies that participated in a study sponsored by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB). ASARB originally invited 285 religious bodies that could be identified as having congregations in the United States to participate. The final list of participants included 139 Christian denominations, associations, or communions (including Latter-day Saints and Unitarian/Universalist groups); two specially defined groups of independent Christian churches; Jewish and Islamic figures; and counts of temples for six Eastern religions.

Groups were asked to furnish data for their statistical year ending in 2000. They were also asked to furnish data--by county--on the number of their congregations, members, adherents, and average weekly attendance. However, groups were not required to report every data item in order to participate. The minimum necessary to participate was the number of congregations by county. In addition, many groups had not determined the county locations of their congregations. In these cases, groups were asked to include address information (at least city, state, and Zip Code) so that the RCMS office could determine county locations.

Guidelines were provided as to the definitions of congregations, members, adherents, and attendees, but the actual definitions employed may vary from group to group. For those groups that provided the definitions they used, the published study does include an appendix listing their definitions.

The RCMS definition guidelines were:

Congregations: Any churches, mosques, synagogues, temples or other local meeting places (as defined by each religious body).

Members: Individuals with full membership status (as defined by each religious body).

Adherents: All members, including full members, their children and the estimated number of other participants who are not considered members. If unavailable, the study will estimate the number of adherents from the known number of members. (The RCMS estimation procedure computes what percentage of the county’s population a group’s membership comprises. This percentage is applied to the counties population for those under age 14. The membership total and percentage of children under 14 are added together for the estimated adherent figure. This procedure was done for 67 groups.)

Attendees: Average weekly worship attendance.

RCMS 2000 locates membership, adherent, and attendance figures by the county in which the congregation itself is located, rather than by the county in which individuals actually reside. (The one exception to this in the 2000 study is the data for the Baha’i, whose membership and adherent data were reported by county of residence.) Because modern mobility makes crossing county boundaries easy, comparisons to county populations may be misleading at times. Especially in the case of large urban areas, combining counties into standard metropolitan areas might be wiser when making comparisons to the population.

Cautions Using the Data

Because this study invites religious bodies to participate, not every group chooses to participate, or is able to do so. This becomes evident when one compares the participants in the 1990 and 2000 studies; there are 95 groups that participated in both studies, 54 groups that participated in 2000 but not 1990, and 37 that participated in 1990 but not 2000.

It is worth noting that most of the largest groups do participate, so that the authors are confident in saying that the vast majority of people associated with a congregation are represented within the study. This claim is supported by the fact that the 141,371,963 adherents reported at the county level in RCMS 2000 represents 94% of the national inclusive membership total reported by the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 2001.

There are, however, 14 groups that reported more than 100,000 inclusive members to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches that did not participate in the RCMS 2000 study. These groups include:

Denomination / Membership
African Methodist Episcopal Church / 2,500,000
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church / 1,276,662
Baptist Bible Fellowship / 1,200,000
Christian Brethren / 100,000
Christian Congregation, Inc. / 118,209
Christian Methodist Episcopal Church / 784,114
Church of God In Christ / 5,499,875
Full Gospel Fellowship of Churches and Ministers International / 325,000
Jehovah's Witnesses / 990,340
National Baptist Convention of America, Inc. / 3,500,000
National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc./ 8,200,000
National Missionary Baptist Convention of America / 2,500,000
Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, Inc. / 1,500,000
Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc./ 2,500,000

Many of the groups listed above are historically African American religious bodies. The absence of these bodies must be considered when studying religious adherence within areas of the country with a significant African American population.
RCMS 2000 provides both a Jewish Estimate and Muslim Estimate whose reporting methodology is somewhat different than groups that have a national office that collects participation data. The Jewish Estimate includes secular Jews and is therefore most unlike the data for other groups (whose counts are for individuals actually participating in a local congregation). The Muslim Estimate more closely resembles the number of people actually associated with a mosque, and is therefore more comparable to figures for other groups. Please see the publication’s appendices for details on how these estimates were gathered.

Additional Resources:
• Key findings from study
• Key findings for specific religious bodies
• Glossary of terms/abbreviations
• History and background of the study
• Resource people to contact
• Listings and rankings
• Maps
• To preview 2000 study online
• To order