Key points:
- The General Council of Finance and Administrative has released a new website that shows trends among U.S. United Methodist churches.
- While The United Methodist Church continued to see its U.S. membership slide in 2025, there are signs of growth.
- These include an uptick in professions of faith, small-group participation and volunteers putting their faith into action.
When the Rev. Barbara Aziz first arrived in 2023, First United Methodist Church in Portland, Texas, had only three active youth — and they were the children of the volunteers leading the youth program.
This year, the resilient church on Texas’ storm-battered Gulf coast celebrated the confirmation of 10 youth, five of whom the church also baptized. The congregation, which also marked its centennial this month, now sees bustling youth nights and a growing number of young families on Sunday mornings.
“This church values people, and it shows,” Aziz said. “At First UMC, Portland, all are welcome and are loved. I think it’s because of the value placed on mission and outreach that we have lasted 100 years.”
First United Methodist’s turnaround exemplifies the kind of growth that the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration found in analyzing the 2025 reports collected from U.S. churches.
The agency’s data services department this week debuted UMC Statistical Insights, a website that provides a more detailed look at how U.S. churches are faring across a variety of metrics. They include membership, worship, stewardship and ministry beyond the church doors.
The numbers help tell the story of how United Methodist churches, both large and small, are fostering Christian discipleship and impacting people’s lives.
“Our local churches are doing remarkable ministry, and the new UMC Statistical Insights analysis report helps us see it,” Caitlin Congdon, the top executive of the General Council on Finance and Administration, said in a news release. “We hope this analysis will encourage congregations and conferences as they look at what God is doing through their ministries.”
What the agency found paints a more complicated picture of the U.S. church than any single line on a chart.
Make no mistake: The United Methodist Church last year continued its decades-long slide in U.S. membership and worship attendance — a trend also seen across Christian traditions in the country.
Between 2024 and 2025, the church’s U.S. membership dropped by nearly 4.4% to about 3.8 million people. That total makes United Methodists about 1.1% of the U.S. population.
In-person average weekly worship attendance in the U.S. also dipped by about 3% to a bit over 1 million. Another 986,402 worshipped online. The trend spanned nationwide with all five U.S. United Methodist jurisdictions seeing decreases in membership and worship attendance.
A look at global data
For the first time, the General Council on Finance and Administration is sharing interactive dashboards to examine membership in the denomination’s eight regional conferences in Africa, Europe and the Philippines.
Those dashboards can be found at umanalytics.gcfa.org, based on information GCFA has collected since 2017. The Book of Discipline has required GCFA to take official statistics from annual conference journals since 2016.
Based on the most recent journals submitted as of Oct. 7, the General Council on Finance and Administration reports that The United Methodist Church has a total of about 10.3 million members across Africa, Europe, the Philippines and the United States.
That total marks a decline from a high of an estimated 12.5 million in 2017. The drop comes after The United Methodist Church saw the withdrawal of thousands of congregations and even entire conferences in Russia and Côte d’Ivoire amid the denomination’s debate around LGBTQ inclusion.
Still, GCFA staff emphasize that number could change. The agency is still compiling 2025 statistics from annual conference journals as they arrive.
People can see updated data for U.S. churches at umdata.org as well as the overview for U.S. data at UMC Statistical Insights 2025.
“Data might sound technical, but in the life of the church it is deeply pastoral,” Caitlin Congdon, the General Council on Finance and Administration’s top executive, told UM News.
“Behind every membership figure is a human life; behind every local church record is a living worshipping community; and behind every annual conference report is a part of our global family that deserves to be accurately seen and known.”
Read press release.
However, the General Council on Finance and Administration also reports some encouraging developments in 2025:
- Churches across all five jurisdictions saw an increase in professions of faith through confirmation — the biggest gain in participation. All told, 25,444 people became United Methodist church members through confirmation, up 1,363 or nearly 5.7%. Most confirmands are youth.
- Congregations sustained 63,589 ongoing small groups, an increase of 1,058 or nearly 1.7%.
- Church closures fell by nearly 44% from 960 in 2024 to 540 last year. In addition, 214 active congregations began as new church starts. Fewer doors closed, and new ones opened alongside them.
- Churches’ building debt fell by $106.7 million, down by more than 10.13%, and budget income rose by 0.25%. Still, operating costs also increased.
- At the same time, congregations also saw increases in community ministries and volunteers. In 2025, churches offered 106,512 community ministries, 4,174 more than in 2024. They also saw 13,953 people serve as volunteers on mission teams, an increase of 2.5%. A total of 857,232 clergy and laity engaged in mission last year.
- Perhaps most significantly, United Methodist churches served neighbors more than 34 million times through food pantries, shelters, recovery groups, after-school programs, disaster response and other community ministries. That’s essentially the same reach with fewer church members.
First United Methodist Church in Portland, Texas, across a channel from Corpus Christi, typifies many of the trends the denomination has seen across the U.S. That includes facing many upheavals in the past decade.
Hurricane Harvey’s destruction in 2017 forced the church out of its worship center and day school for one year.
COVID-19 shuttered doors again three years later, compelling church members to get creative in both worship and outreach. Aziz said church members held drive-by parties for people at local retirement centers and those stuck at home, so they knew they weren’t alone.
When the denomination saw U.S. church disaffiliations spike in 2022 and 2023, First United Methodist became a “Lighthouse Congregation,” providing a beacon for people who wanted to remain United Methodist even as their former churches left.
Through all these challenges, the church persisted in outreach to its neighbors —helping with a local food pantry, partnering with the local school district and building beds and even a home for families in need.
In the aftermath of COVID-19, Aziz said the church also put special attention in reaching children and youth — eventually hiring separate children and youth ministry directors.
After not offering confirmation classes for a few years, the church has started doing so again.
“The program grew because families began to return and several new families joined our church as well,” Aziz said. “Each youth also had a mentor or sponsor who attended sessions with them. This helped show them that they were important to the entire church.”
Today, the Texas church has about 403 members and a growing worship attendance that now averages 288 a week. As part of its 100th anniversary celebration Oct. 4, the church cut the ribbon for its new administrative center.
Nevertheless, Aziz said she always emphasizes that church is more than what happens within its walls on Sunday mornings.
“At the end of nearly every church service,” she said, “I end my blessing with the words, ‘Church starts now.’”
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The Portland congregation is part of the Rio Texas Conference, which was the only U.S. conference to see positive moves in all nine metrics that the UMC Statistical Insights website tracks. That includes growing overall in worship attendance by nearly 2% and seeing a stunning 132% growth in professions of faith through confirmation.
The other measurements the website tracked include baptisms of people 13 and older, people served, ministries offered, people engaged in mission, budget income, capital giving and a reduction in building debt.
In addition to Rio Texas, another 15 U.S. conferences saw positive movement in at least seven of the nine measures.
Bishop Cynthia Fierro Harvey leads both the Rio Texas and Texas conferences. She said Portland First United Methodist is an example of the faithful ministry happening across Rio Texas, which spans from Austin south to Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande Valley.
“During their recent celebration of 100 years of ministry and witness in the Portland community, they shared a phrase that has stayed with me: ‘The first 100 years were a gift. The next 100 years are a calling,’” she said.
“Across Rio Texas, we see this same spirit of faithfulness in churches of all sizes. The signs of vitality we are seeing are encouraging, but behind those numbers are people encountering God’s grace, communities being served, and lives being transformed. That is what we celebrate, and that is the work we are called to continue.”
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umnews.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
