Since the 1960s, Canada’s mainline Protestant denominations — made up of the Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian and United churches — have lost anywhere between 40 to 60 per cent of their membership. Some research colleagues and I wanted to find out why.

We’d read the previous academic studies and there was no consensus. Many of the popular texts on the subject, written primarily by mainline theologians, suggested liberal theology was the key to growth. Liberal theology calls clergy and lay people to practice a metaphorical interpretation of the Bible and to temper their belief in supernatural phenomenon in order to make their religious message more palatable for modern audiences.

As a researcher it’s not often you make a discovery that flies in the face of conventional wisdom but, when we finished assessing our data, that’s what happened. We found it is conservative theology — with its emphasis on the factual truth of scripture and God’s activity in the world — that fuels church growth. Liberal theology leads to decline.

To get to our findings we tracked down an elusive sample of growing mainline congregations, increasing in attendance by at least 2 per cent per year, and compared them to a sample of declining. We surveyed more than 2,200 of the congregants, half growing and half declining, and the clergy who serve them.

We found, without exception, the clergy and congregants of the growing mainline Protestant churches held more firmly to traditional Christian beliefs — such as the belief Jesus rose physically from the grave and that God answers prayer. The clergy of the growing churches were the most theologically conservative and the declining church clergy the least. When we used statistical analysis to determine which factors are influencing growth, conservative Protestant theology was a significant predictor.

In the last week or so our findings have been widely reported and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they have also been attacked. Conventional wisdom doesn’t go quietly.

Several critics have argued that liberal churches do grow and they know this because they’ve seen it. This is anecdotal fallacy and betrays faulty reasoning. “One-offs” or unverified, isolated examples cannot be used to dismiss strong statistical evidence.

Related to statistical evidence, some have said our sample of 22 churches, nine growing, should have been larger. As to the growing churches in our sample, I would remind those critics that you can’t study what you can’t find. We contacted denominational offices in Ontario but got few referrals; some churches they said were growing, weren’t.

So, we also searched independently. Those we found, we studied. Accurate results are dependent on strong method. Our statistical method was tested and approved via rigorous peer-review by the Review of Religious Research, one of the top journals in the world for scientific study of religion.

Furthermore, studies with larger samples do not contradict our findings. For example, The Faith Communities Today Study out of the U.S. analyzed data from thousands of congregations. That study found, by far, growing churches had clergy and congregants who were theological conservatives. Unlike our research, that study made no link between theology and growth but as we point out in our academic work, it didn’t adequately explore the issue. It asked just one question of one person, the church pastor, to gauge theological outlook of an entire congregation. We surveyed all the congregants and the clergy in each church and asked many theological questions. Better questions elicit more accurate results.

The last common assertion of our critics is that some factor besides theology is the real cause of growth. For example, we’ve been told that churches featuring clergy with strong convictions will grow regardless of doctrinal leanings. But we would point out that different convictions, though equally strong, produce different outcomes.

For example, all the growing church clergy in our study, because of their theological outlook, held the conviction that it was “very important to encourage non-Christians to become Christians.” Conversely, half the clergy at the declining churches held the opposite conviction, believing it was not desirable to convert non-Christians. Comparing the two convictions, which do you think is more likely to generate church growth?

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Paradox is intimately and profoundly connected to the Christian experience. Christians are told such things as “the first shall be last” and “to save your life you must lose it.” Now we can add a new paradox to the list: conservative theology leads to church growth and liberal theology leads to decline.