The larger picture warrants increasing skepticism that the denomination will survive the 21stcentury. At the current average of losses over the last 14 years – a time zone that is marked by the most radical changes in the denomination’s history – the lights will go out in about a half century.

The membership plunge in the Presbyterian Church (USA) has been steep for years, but nothing like what has happened in the last 14 years and especially the last four.

The annual trend is even larger losses numerically. Moreover, the denomination is likely to lose another huge chunk in 2012 as congregations continue to work through responses to the denomination’s vote to allow the ordination of men and women involved in same-sex relationships as well as other lingering departures from Reformed theology.

Then there’s the long wait until the General Assembly of 2014 when commissioners will be under pressure to approve same-gender marriages, an issue they pushed aside at the 2012 General Assembly, maybe to avoid a near-total collapse.

The denomination’s comparative statistics reveal an unrelenting march toward extinction unless – and this is always possible – God reforms it with a Great Awakening scale.

This article focuses on what has happened since 1983, the year of the remarriage of the former Presbyterian Church U.S. (Southern) and the United Presbyterian Church (Northern). They came together with the blessings of both denominations’ general assemblies to end the division that began with the Civil War in 1861.

The PCUSA, which began with a combined 3,131,228 members, began losing some immediately. During the first full 14 years of the PCUSA (1984-97), membership shrunk by 522,037, a rate of 37,288 per year, substantial losses but mild compared to the next 14 years.

Read More (with chart) [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]