Official Church statistics are going to be expanded to include a “nonbinary/genderqueer” category.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) says that its annual reports will now have a section called “nonbinary/genderqueer.”
On Tuesday, a number of changes to how the PCUSA’s Office of the General Assembly reported denominational data on membership and the number of congregations.
The biggest Presbyterian denomination in the United States will introduce a nonbinary/genderqueer category in addition to the conventional men’s and women’s categories starting with the statistics for the next year.V
If they “want to be inclusive, then we have to start asking because you should be aware of who’s a member of your church,” accoding to Kris Valerius, manager of denominational duties and statistics.
“We’ll still have categories, but we’re no longer defining them,” which could rile some people up. We’re merely getting rid of the definitions, but the information will still be there, she said.
“For instance, we’ve always inquired about the proportion of female churchgoers. We’re now asking how many members there are total—men, women, and nonbinary/genderqueer people. We have never posed that question, so we cannot predict how many responses there will be.
In addition, the financial part has been changed, an age category has been added to track how many members are 17 or older, definitions from the ethnic and racial sections have been removed, and the section on Christian education has been removed.
“Statistics show what kind of denomination we are. In addition to preachers and churches, it’s also about who we are right now, according to Valerius.
Similar to other Christian groups, both the number of active members and the number of member churches has gone down a lot in the PCUSA.
For instance, the PCUSA said earlier this year that it had lost over 51,000 members, over 100 churches, and even four regional bodies, or presbyteries, in 2021.
According to the most current statistics available, the church has 166 presbyteries, 8,813 congregations, and around 1.1 million active members.
In comparison, the PCUSA claimed to have 10,262 member congregations and 1.84 million members (or over 700,000 more than at the time) in 2012. (or around 1,400 more than at present).
The PCUSA’s greater acceptance of homosexuality, which has led hundreds of member churches to abandon the mainstream Protestant denomination, has been one reason for this fall.
A few years after the PCUSA decided to permit the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals, ECO, or the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians, was created in 2012. It is a theologically orthodox Presbyterian church.
Most of ECO’s congregations used to be part of PCUSA, so in 2016 it reached the 300-member congregation mark.
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