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The following is a synopsis or excerts from a talk given by Rev. Dr. Stephen Perry, author and retired elder of the Dakotas Conference. Perry shared this talk at the Dakotas Conference Historical Society Luncheon at the 2023 Dakotas Annual Conference on June 7, 2023. 

Twenty years ago, Charles Finney, a former president of this historical society, asked me to work on a plan to update the Dakotas conference histories that had been published during the 1960’s. I still remember this conversation. It was at annual conference in Fargo next to a display where I was selling my first book, In Praise of the Trinity (2003).

I have now completed close-to-final drafts for five of seven chapters of the new conference history, taking the story from Dakota Territory and before down to the merger of 1968 that created The United Methodist Church. These drafts are available on the internet, and I am grateful for the feedback that I have received from people who have actually read them.

The purpose of my talk here today is to lift out of these drafts one of the conclusions I’ve come to about our history and try to get it into our thinking about the future...

For our time in Dakotas United Methodist history, membership decline has to be a major problem that any history of our recent past must try to explain. It’s not the only thing and probably not the most important thing that happened, but it certainly lies in plain sight inside our central historical documents, the conference journals.

The 1971 journals for the North Dakota and South Dakota annual conferences reported total church membership at 67,757. The 2022 journal of the Dakotas Annual Conference reported 35,451. That’s a drop of 48% in 51 years.

Why did this happen?

Dakotas United Methodists have been talking about membership decline for most of the last 51 years, and many of us have ready and familiar explanations.

Death is certainly one of them. Death is memorable, and we all have known and grieved for United Methodists who died since The United Methodist Church began.

Rural population decline provides another explanation. Small churches have gotten smaller because members moved away to find employment in an economy that no longer needed a large number of farms. Although migrating rural members may have joined another congregation, that congregation might not have been in the Dakotas, and it might not have been United Methodist. This has been happening since the early 20th century. It created in large measure the present congregational structure of our annual conference. Most of the members now hold their membership in a few large congregations, but most of the congregations have a small number of members...

But now we are breaking up, and that gives us another familiar and painfully obvious explanation for membership decline, namely, separation...

Another kind of membership decline has happened because, a long time ago, the largest pool of potential new members began to dry up. The ancestors of today’s Dakotas United Methodists started having fewer children...

The reality that the past has left with us is the reality that we have become a smaller church. This and not something else is the reality that we have inherited. We are now stewards of that reality.

We can deny it. We can try to avoid it. Or we can confess that the good God wants for us is something other than we thought and remains hidden somewhere in our actual situation.

As I conclude, I invite you to think about the good God wants for us. You can do this at least as well as I can, and the Church needs us all to think in order to avoid the classic problems of small denominations and to avoid becoming people who dwell on the past and days of glory when we were more numerous.

Read the entire talk