www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Which Catholic Churches are growing and why

I have a strong hunch that the Charismatic and Pentecostal explosion is only temporary, and that it will begin contracting pretty soon. Emotions can only carry a movement so far, and once the emotion and the fire dries up, what then?

I fear that these movements will actually hasten the collapse of real religion.

In my own country, the Philippines, which is one of the centers of Catholic charismaticism, Catholic charismatic numbers are actually at a free fall, with thousands either getting burned out, disillusioned, becoming more traditional, or simply abandoning religious belief altogether.

Our two largest Catholic charismatic groups -- El Shaddai and Couples for Christ -- are both rapidly shrinking, the former due to its direputable political manuevering and financial scandals, the latter due to an acrimonious "civil war" among its leaders. Both used to have more than a million members each, the former boasting as many as 10 million members. Today, both movements have contracted into hundreds of thousands -- and are getting smaller by the day. The largest Evangelical-Charismatic groups ("Jesus Is Lord", "Jesus Miracle Crusade", etc.) have also lost a large portion (if not the majority) of their following due to their leaders' political games.

Instead, in the last five years or so, it is irreligion, secularistic attitudes and disbelief that have grown phenomenally. The collapse of many of the charismatic and evangelical groups seem to have actually hastened the advent of secularism into the Philippines, since these religious movements made too many Filipinos think that religion is primarily a matter of feelings and emotions, and not about real commitment or the conversion of the mind to the teaching of the Gospel.

In my previous life as an Episcopal priest, I worked as a full-time Church Growth specialist. I travelled around the country giving seminars on "how to grow a local church" and participated in larger seminars on the subject. What we found through this process is that churches grow (or don't grow) most often for local reasons -- e.g., how well they take care of their people, how loving and receptive the people are to visitors, what the reputation in the local community is -- and that very seldom (from a statistical point of view) does it matter if the church is "liberal" or "conservative" (remember we are talking about the Episcopal church!) or if it has a "traditional" or "modern" liturgical service. We also found that demographics have a lot to do with it -- The best Church doesn't grow if it is stuck in an area that is losing people. The best Church doesn't have young people if the local area does not provide adequate paying jobs for them. Etc.