Female Ordination Statistics

A:  Episcopal church, taken from https://episcopalchurch.org/files/2004GrowthReport(1).pdf Red line shows female ordination.

B: Evangelical Lutheran Church: Ordination of females was instituted in 1990.  1990 membership stats from their executive summary shows  2,919,270 active Evangelical Lutherans, or 262.16 confirmed active members per congregation on average. In the 2000 report membership stats show 180.66 confirmed active members per congregation on average, and the 2001 report gave 173.66.   The Evangelical Lutheran Church was formed in 1997, and have never grown.

C: Disciples of Christ: They were already struggling before 1970, Which sealed their fate.

D: Unitarian Universalist: Possibly the only congregation to report getting their membership numbers back up.  Women reportedly started seeking to be ministers around 1970, according to here https://www.meadville.edu/files/resources/v2n1-sangrey-the-feminization-of-the-unitarian-uni.pdf, they lost a solid 15% of their membership in 12 years before turning the trend around.  There's no way I see to determine what percentage here is active attendees- Blue line marks end of decline, though they still have not broken even with their 1960 numbers.

E: United Church of Christ: Pretty much always allowing female ordination, but had less than 20 female clergywomen (among thousands) until roughly 1970s with the women's suffrage movement, according to the UCC's article.  http://www.thearda.com/denoms/D_1463.asp shows They gained members until about a year before 1970s, and then immediately entered a decline which has not recovered.  In the 40 years since, they have lost over *half* their membership.

F: United Methodists: Beginning ordination in 1968, they show the exact same trend as the United Church of Christ.  They have lost three million members in 40 years.

G: RLDS (Community of Christ) - 1984 - Can't really find any good data on this one, the only statistical set I can find shows gains and losses over 50% from year to year at random.  I assume there's been a lot of change in how they've done their statistical reporting.

Major churches which do not echo the death spiral (and do not ordain women) include Jehova's Witnesses, The Church of Jesus Christ, Roman Catholic, and Southern Baptist. https://ifphc.wordpress.com/2017/05/10/church-stats-1975-2015-charts-show-decline-of-mainline-protestants-and-growth-of-pentecostals/

General Conference and Multiple Witnesses

Short talk I gave in church today.  Mostly unedited notes other than the markers regarding parts I could cut out if I was short on time.

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There I was, in the Mississippi Jungle, fried chicken in one hand, Bible in the other, name tag on my shirt signaling intent of preachin' the word o' God.  I was lanky and dangerous, and the miles of daily biking had boosted my metabolism to scientifically improbable levels.  I'd eat two subway footlong sandwhiches for lunch and twice that for dinner, and members showed their appreciation for the missionary work I did by taking me to all you can eat buffets just for the spectacle of the thing.  I was maybe slightly skinnier than I am now.  Often the people throughout the land were heard to exclaim: "That's obscene!  I'm pretty sure gluttony is a sin!".  So I, like a good little Elder, pulled out my scriptures for personal study and looked up gluttony, and you know what I found?

Its not a sin!  The Bible doesn't condemn gluttony anywhere! The only place the word is used is when Pharisees accuse Jesus himself of being a glutton!  So it went that when I was met with accusation of gluttony, I would reply "Bible don't condemn it!". I was rationalizing, but it justified my lifestyle and that's what scriptures are for, right?  But that all changed when general conference came around.  You see, we were in the church listening to the sessions on the screen and it was going pretty good until some guy named Jorg Clebenskot, in the middle of some irrelevant talk on making a happier marriage or something, pauses, and he looks right at me, and says "Oh and by the way pay attention to what and especially how much you eat, because it will affect your ability to be in tune with the spirit."

October 2014 general conference.  Ruined my life. 

Anyway I was convicted, the spirit stripped my rationalizing away and told me what was right and what was wrong on a completely obscure topic that I had gotten off track on, and it did this on a screen in front of 15 million people who as far as I know for the most part didn't need that particular correction.

A common critisicm of the Church of Jesus Christ is that we have and study from the Book of Mormon, and accept it as the word of God.  They say, quote, "A bible, a bible, we have got a bible, and we need no more bible!".  What these people don't understand is that God is too big to contain himself in just one revelation, like it says in the last verse in John's gospel. There's nobody on Earth who you could just write a book about and encompass every aspect of them and their personality and experience.  Some churches try with creeds, but those don't take into account history past or future, and fall short because a list of attributes, no matter how thorough, will always fail to encapsulate how a person will feel, think about, and react to, another real person or situation.  They have to be generic, and in doing so they lose some accuracy.  Personality tests are the same way.  They are great for introspection and learning about yourself, but always end up a poor descriptor of others, though as C.S. Lewis put it "we'd all like to think we've got each other taped."

So you have a Bible, and you have a Book of Mormon.  As missionaries we'd teach about this, that since the Bible fails to capture everything about God, you end up with over 30,000 different sects of Christianity, with their own creeds and ideas about who and what God is.  But if you add a second witness, then it is much more difficult to go astray.  There are diverging sects of the Church of Jesus Christ, but all except I think 2 have under a thousand memebers, and most died out completely shortly after their inception. Two witnesses anchors the gospel in place. 

If you nail a board to a wall with just one nail, the board can be rotated to point any number of directions, but if you add a second nail, in a differnt location, then the board is firmly anchored.  Now, we're all children of God, and we all have the promise of the companionship of the holy ghost, so what do we need prophets for?  This is a common critisicm I've heard.  Why not, the thought goes, just have a "personal relationship with Jesus" and not bother with religion at all?  Well, what I've seen is that too often overreliance on "a personal relationship with God" becomes basically an excuse to charicature God entirely, and God himself becomes a puppet concept to mirror back to us our own desires. its perhaps always a temptation to make God in our own image.  But besides that, sometimes we receive revelations of all sorts and say "is this God?  Is this myself?  Is this something else?"  And that's okay.  What a living prophet does is place a second nail in the board.  Also, it goes the other way too.  Just the living prophet with no personal experiences with God is just a single nail.  Your conference experience will be far more vibrant if you've been working on your living relationship with God, and there's two weeks now to prepare, so.

I have sometimes received revelations that I wasn't sure about, and even some that contradicted what I felt was right.  This is rare, but when it happens, what I have found and I'd like to bear testimony of is that when God sends a dicey revelation, if you're seeking his will, not yours, if it is a true revelation he will send more than one witness.  You will hear it echoed from the pulpit, from those with priesthood keys and the stewardship.  We often think of Priesthood keys as simply authority to direct God's work, but there is more to them than that. 

In the gospel of John 18:14 Caiaphas gave counsel that it was expedient that one man should die for the people.  James E Talmage saw in this the spirit of prophesy working in the High Priest of Israel, EVEN THOUGH this man was not righteous.  He talks about this in his book Jesus the Christ.  He was trying to kill God, but the keys were still active.

So we should seek revelation from God through every resource he makes available to us, so that we can be sure that we are on the straight and narrow path.  As we do this our testimonies will be strengthened and we will come to know God in a richer, deeper, and more vibrant way, as we gain more perspectives than ours and collect witnessess along the iron rod and gain the sweetness of the tree of life.