Over 400 Excommunicated from Church of God in Christ Mennonite in Single Year, Records Indicate
As the 2022 general conference approaches, leaders are expected to deliver a lecture on the proper treatment of excommunicated former members. This raises the question how many people does this issue really affect? The Holdeman Reporter has compared church membership tallies from the church’s 2021 yearbook to the same information in the 2022 yearbook, factoring in deaths, baptisms and reacceptances to estimate the approximate number of excommunications conference-wide in 2021. Based on the methodology outlined below, we estimate that over 400 members were excommunicated in just one year.
Methodology
Let’s crunch the numbers. We’ll start with the official total membership tally from the yearbook published in early 2021.
Total Membership per 2021 yearbook — 27,088
To that tally, we’ll add the baptisms for the following year, which appear in the yearbook published in early 2022.
Total Baptisms in past year per 2022 yearbook — 643
Then we subtract the total deaths for the year, also from the 2022 yearbook.
Total Deaths in past year per 2022 yearbook — 265
We then subtract from that result the total membershp tally in the 2022 yearbook.
Total Membership per 2022 yearbook — 27,118
This math tells us how many people are missing, how many more people were excommunicated than were reaccepted in the one year cycle.
More excommunications than reacceptances in 2021 cycle — 348
From there, we just need to know how many folks were reaccepted in 2021 to figure out approximately how many people were expelled in total. Church of God in Christ Mennonite’s bi-weekly publication, the Messenger of Truth publishes most reacceptances, although we have found that church staff exercise discretion, choosing not to publish them in some cases. In 2021, the Messenger of Truth recorded 58 reacceptances. To get an approximate total of members excommunicated for the year, we add 58 to the result of our math above.
Total Reacceptances in Messenger of Truth in 2021– 58
I’ll go over the math again more quickly.
27,088 members in early 2021 + 643 new members for the year -265 deaths for the year = 27,466 members expected if none were expelled.
27,466 expected members — 27118 actual members = 348 more expelled than reaccepted
58 reacceptanced + 348 more expelled than reaccepted = approximately 406 members excommunicated in a year.
Please note that we do not know the exact publcation dates of the yearbooks for either year, but we are assuming that the supplied membership totals cover a one year span. We also do not know whether the tally of deaths includes non-members, which could mean total excommunicated is actually greater. Because of this, the above figures should be thought of as approximate.
Further research would need to be done to determine whether these numbers are typical for the church. Nonetheless, this shows the scale of the consequences if church leaders seek to increase the practice of The Avoidance at the upcoming general conference.
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