Idolatry of Numbers

The UUA asks congregations to register their voting membership every year for purposes of determining their fair share allotment to the annual program fund. This registration is not, and never has been a measure of the growth of Unitarian Universalism. Each congregations determines their voting membership based on entirely different criteria.
While I don't fault those who use this enumeration as a basis of comparison between congregations, it seldom gives much useful information.

I could point to one problem of enumeration, there are reporting differences based on the size of congregations. Large congregations pay fair share based on the percentage of their budget, rather than the number of voting members. Smaller congregations must pay dollars for every member they report. Small congregations under report, folks who are active in the congregation but don't contribute enough money to pay their portion of the annual program fund are often left of the role. Large congregations over report, we have congregations that claim folks that haven't sat in a pew in years. Because they pay a percentage of their budget to the UUA and District rather than a per capita, reporting those lost members isn't as painful as it would be for a small congregation. Shaving twenty less than active members of the roles for a small congregation can make a balanced budget and a deficit budget.

But my real concern is counting voting members seduces us into thinking that we understand growth by looking a quantitative measurements alone. A congregation grows by becoming a qualitatively deeper and more loving community, by extending its ministries and becoming more welcoming and accessible to new constituencies. To grow in these ways may result in greater numbers in the long run, but skipping this kind of transformative work only leads to the revolving door.

We have congregations that are growing in numbers and we have congregations that are declining in numbers because of changing demographics, economic dislocations, and internal conflicts. But without careful attention to the internal dynamic we know nothing about growth within those congregations based on how many voting members they report that year.

Real growth, transformative growth, goes on day by day in the congregations. The UUA HQ can serve that growth, celebrate that growth, and occasionally it can even provide resources that will enable that growth. But the congregations grow the UUA, the UUA does not grow the congregations.