Stumbled across this surfing and found it interesting. Given the background in the generation of the piece (short time line, author not having time to do the background research she wanted, decisions by the editors, etc) it’s no wonder it became such a fiasco. Poor author was practically set up to fall on her face. Poor form on the part of the editors and staff at UUWorld it seems
Given the interesting discussion about the UUA and UUism's turn away from a spiritual group/society into a matching and chowder society, there had come up a question as to whether this could mean the death of UUism.
Funny enough, there are metrics for that, heck the UUA is reporting those metrics on the regular as a part of their "Healthy and vital UU community" end on their "dashboard"!
As we all know, membership has been declining for years, with the peak being a little more than 177,000 members in 1968, a nadir of ~135,500 in 1982, and then a second peak in 2009 when there were ~164,500 members. But what about the "Trump Bump", when distraught people sought out like minded people in faith communities to make sense of a world that elected Drumpf to office? Well that totally didn't materialize into growth, in fact between 2016 and 2017 membership DROPPED by ~1,400 members, or a little less than 1%.
Meanwhile, over the last 5 years (2015 to 2019, inclusive) membership is down 1,916 or 1.2%. And yet, that is not the most troubling statistic. Steadily losing 1% over 5 years isn't going to be the death of a group on its own.
But, failing to grow or attract new people? Yeah that can be a problem; one that can become a major one. From UUA's own reporting, from 2015 to 2019 Religious Education Enrollment declined from 47,623 to 38,116, that's over 9,500 children who no longer participate in the RE programs, a drop of 20% over 5 years. The 15-year attrition rate is even worse with a reduction of 23,606 or 38%. To put this into perspective, if the RE programs lose the same amount of kids this year that they lost between 2018-19, then they will be at their lowest count since 1981, and really the lowest ever since we started tracking this data in 1960-61.
Well what about our "non-member friends"? These are the people that donate financially, but aren't members; or attend on the regular, but don't become members; or whose children they send to RE, but aren't members; or those who participate in outreach programs put on by the congregation; etc. Those numbers are even worse. From 2015 to 2016 there was is a massive drop from 191,876 to 99,529. A drop that big usually indicates either changing how you quantify a metric or a giant purge/reorientation of data, so that would be the type of thing one might discount.
But, even if you use the 2016 number and compare to the 2019 number, the drop off in non-member friends has been precipitous with a loss of 26,611 from 2016 to 2019, a decline of 27% of non-member friends in just 4 years. If you want to use that 2015 number as a legitimate starting point, then you're talking a 5-year loss of 118,958 people, a drop of 62%!
Non-member friends and children participating in RE are the future of UUism... and their numbers are declining rapidly. And that's how a organization or group dies, the future potential members and generations walk away to the point where you become irrelevant.
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