Making It In Today's Religious Market

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In June, the Religion News Service posted a news item about the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) entitled, "Can a creedless religion make it another 50 years?"  The UUA recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of its 1961 merger of Unitarians and Universalists into a single denomination dedicated to pluralism, social justice, and doctrinal openness.  Now, according to the article, some UUA leaders are beginning to wonder if they have gone too far in rejecting any talk about God and beliefs.  While promoting progressive causes, UUA congregations evidently habitually avoid discussing doctrines in order to avoid imposing one set of beliefs or another on their congregants, who are very much a mixed bag of people with many different backgrounds and ideas of their own.

Like many other denominations, the UUA is showing signs of statistical decline, which raises questions for the future.  The decline seems modest by Presbyterian Church (USA) standards.  According to the article, the UUA's 2011 statistics record a loss of membership of less than 1% and that the UUA has only shown such losses for the last three years.   The PC(USA) runs 2-4% losses annually and has been declining statistically for decades.  Still, the question of renewal is being discussed, esp. in terms of finding ways to state what the UUA does believe.  There is a feeling that it has been so open as to have lost a sense of commitment necessary to growing into the future.  At the same time, UUA leaders see an opportunity in the millions of Americans dropping away from organized religion, feeling that the UUA could and should be a home for them.

Among the questions facing the UUA according to one of its leading voices are, "What do we believe? Whom do we serve? To whom or what are we responsible? Those are the questions with which every viable religious movement must wrestle,"

They are good questions, but one wonders whether wrestling with them or even finding acceptable answers to them will make much of a difference in the UUA's statistical decline, assuming that decline continues.  Mainline denominations with many more members and resources have devoted time and talent to restating their creeds, restructuring their structures, and redefining their mission pretty much to no avail.  As noted in an earlier RPK posting (here), the Southern Baptist Convention has also begun to experience statistical decline and has similarly begun to seek ways to address it.  On can hardly accuse the SBC of a lack of clarity in its doctrines or its sense of mission.  Yet, decline has set it.

Something deeper is going on, a shift in American spirituality.  The literature trying to define and deal with this shift is huge.  But the decline continues.