Image Courtesy of Nicole Fields Photography
Ryan Burge loves religion data. And for a religion data analyst, the PCA stats are a treasure trove.
Burge is a professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and writes about religious and political data at Graphs About Religion.
Today, Burge published a post analyzing some of the information available publicly in the PCA’s 2024 statistics. He plans to publish more analysis in January 2026.
ByFaith talked with Burge about the trends he has noticed in PCA data — the reasons for concern and what he sees as encouraging — and why the PCA’s available data is unique among American denominations. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You have mentioned on social media that the PCA punches above its weight class. What do you mean?
I just mean the Twitter discourse. If you didn’t know the numbers — which I think most people don’t know the numbers — you would assume the PCA has millions of members just based on the chatter. You see it on Twitter, especially. I write about the Black Church? It doesn’t get much attention. I write about the PCA and get 25 retweets and tons of paid subscribers. It was just overwhelming.
You’ve analyzed PCA statistics before. Is there anything that will be different about the drop that’s going to come out on November 13?
It will actually be two drops: November 13th, and there’s one in the first of the year, too. On November 13th, I look at worshipping attendance. I think “what share of members are attenders?” is an interesting question. That’s something every denomination struggles with; our membership rolls are pretty bloated.
In the PCA, it’s actually 79.4%. We can’t know if all the attenders are members, but, if a church has 100 members, on average, they have 80 attenders. To me, that tells me there’s not a lot of bloat in the membership rolls, which is good.
I looked at things like how these churches are adding new people, and I break it down by congregation size. I think that’s the really important metric. Small church pastors look at the numbers and go, “That doesn’t apply to us because we’re a church of 60 people. That might work for a church of 250 people, but how are churches like mine adding people?”
One of the reasons the PCA numbers are so good for me is because it gives you individual lines per church. They don’t do the aggregation. I get to do the aggregation.
And that’s the magic for me. No other denomination does that, as far as I can tell. It’s always aggregated up to the district level or the state level or the national level, so you don’t get to fine grain analysis. For a guy like me, it’s a dream to look at data like that.
You have mentioned that the PCA is good at record keeping. It sounds like that’s one of the things you find helpful is that granular level of analysis.
This data they provide is the most valuable denominational data I’ve ever seen because it’s individual-church-level data. Then I can ask, as an analyst, how do I want to analyze this data? When people give me aggregated data, they’re basically saying, “Here’s what I want you to know.” I don’t want that.
I want to follow my own curiosity, because I think a lot of times, what my readers pay for is seeing what I think is interesting because they’ll find it interesting as well. The PCA gives me a million opportunities there.
Record keeping is hard. Don’t ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. And I don’t think other denominations are malicious about not sharing their data. It’s just really hard to do.
One of the reasons the PCA can still do it is because there’s so many type-A, data-driven people, but, also, the denomination is also small. If you’re a denomination of 20,000 churches, this gets exponentially harder to do on a regular basis.
In sifting through all the data, is there anything that surprised you?
Yeah, a couple things. For instance, the two largest churches in the PCA are ethnic churches. Korean Central Presbyterian Church (in Centreville, Virginia) and Sa-Rang Community Church in Anaheim, California. These were easily the largest churches in the PCA.
When I think of PCA, I don’t think of Korean people. I think of conservative white dudes who are accountants and lawyers. I think it’s an interesting juxtaposition of what you think a denomination looks like versus what the most successful version of that denomination looks like; it’s not the same here.
Is there anything in the data that you would find encouraging?
First off, there’s growth, and any denomination that’s growing right now, that’s good, compared to the baseline. Almost all the other dominations are declining in America. PCA is posting solid growth, too. That’s the important part. You don’t want exponential growth. It actually creates exponential problems. You want like solid 2, 3, or 5% growth, year over year, and that’s really where the PCA is.
The median church size is about 117. That’s interesting to me. It’s actually encouraging in some ways. Obviously the average is way higher than that because you’ve got these very big churches drawing it up. The mean membership is 229. The median is 117. You’ve got some big churches here, but the average PCA church is actually not very big.
I actually think it’s encouraging in a lot of ways. You don’t want a denomination where you’ve got a lot of really big churches and a lot of those small churches. You want that medium-sized church.
Why do you want that medium-sized church?
You have enough programming there, enough staff to do stuff. It’s small enough to still have community, though. Budgeting is hard, because, do we add another staff person? Well, can we afford it? Those kinds of questions creep in. But that’s actually a good size.
PCA people are going to be interested in reading your analysis. Are there caveats that people need to keep in mind as they start reading through all the stats?
I’m only as good as the data I’ve been given. I’ve seen comments here and there that the PCA numbers aren’t right. I get those about every denomination. No denomination is perfect at this. They all try their best.
It’s not my job to investigate the issues. If you give me the data, my job is to analyze the data. And then if you have problems with that, I’m going to point you back to the denomination.
When you saw the big picture trends, were there any trends that you would consider a warning, something to be concerned about?
The largest addition, inflow category into a PCA church is “transfer letter,” which means that 31% of additions to PCA are transfer letter. That’s actually not good because that means you’re not adding new people to the flock. You’re just shuffling the sheep around, and we obviously don’t know where they’re coming from. Are they coming from another PCA church? Another Presbyterian church? Baptist or Methodist? We don’t know that.
The #1 and #2 inflows were transfer letter and reaffirmation of faith. You would want to see professions of faith. That would be good, because that means you’re bringing new people into the fold. But that’s not where a majority of the growth is coming from.
This is the classic problem. Evangelism is hard. Bringing new sheep into the pen is hard. This is not a PCA problem in isolation. This is a problem for Christianity in America, but I think it’s just pretty well evidenced in this data.
And also, by the way, it’s easy to grow when you’re small. The raw numbers matter. If you’re already 1,000,000, you’ve got to add 30,000 people to grow 3%. But if you’re 250,000, you’ve got to grow 7,000 people (to get 3% growth). That’s a lot easier to do just numeric wise.
The one thing I always want to tell PCA people is you’re very small in the grand sweep of American Protestant Christianity.
Is there anything else that I haven’t asked you about that you think is important to note?
The one thing I will say is the losses. The outflows are actually really positive in that they are removing people from the rolls. The PCA is actually good at that. I mean, 39% of all the losses in the PCA are removing people from the rolls. That’s good, because it means they’re trying their best to not over-inflate their membership numbers.
I think a lot of the problems the PCA is facing are also what Southern Baptists are facing, this internal dialogue between, how hardcore are we going to be on women in leadership? How do we keep the two factions of “conservative” and “very conservative” under one umbrella?
And we saw that, you know, in the last meeting when Kevin DeYoung had to tell the person to stop talking. To me, it’s the SBC debate, just on a smaller scale, because the PCA is obviously a whole lot smaller.
Actually, it seems harder if you’re a small denomination because everybody is at those meetings. You can’t get lost in the crowd like you can in SBC-land. So, man, how they navigate that is going to be tough because the far right is loud.