If you want to start a discussion, ask why the number of people in the pews of the main line churches in Canada, and especially in the United Church, has declined precipitously since the 1960s.

The usual answer you will hear most often is that churches have moved away from God and have taken on a larger role in politics or made decisions which people disagree with.

In the case of the United Church, conventional wisdom says that ever since the United Church of Canada said that sexual orientation is no bar to membership and the ministry, church membership has declined.

The problem with that thinking is that none of those conclusions are true.

While there may well be local examples of churches and individuals who left this church or that church for some reason, research has shown conclusively that in the case of the United Church of Canada, no church policy decision or program since the 1960’s can be linked in any way to a decline in membership. Nothing else can be found in other denominations, either.

Brian Clark and Stuart Macdonald of the University of Toronto have studied the state of the church in Canada and have said clearly and unequivocally in a recent research paper they have made available on the Internet that, “. . . if you didn’t know what year the UCC made its (sexuality) declaration, you would be hard pressed to spot when it did based on the UCC’s published statistics.”

In other words, the United Church’s decision had no effect on church membership and any decline in church membership has another cause.

Private conversation with Stuart Macdonald suggests they have no answer. They know when the decline started, but can’t come up with a credible reason. It was only when I read recently of a United Church decision made in 1962 that I realized what had probably happened and can propose a possible answer.

Briefly, a simple administrative decision by the church’s General Council in 1962 resulted in a significant change in membership reporting patterns. It’s a good example of a small change having results different that those which were expected. It’s called the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Dr. Phyllis Airhart is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at the United Church’s Emmanuel College in Toronto. Last month, she published A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada. Airhart spends several pages on a 1962 decision by the church’s General Council to allow local churches to remove members from the church membership roll after three years of not attending worship or Communion.

The decision, intended to make church administration easier, had the unintended consequence of allowing churches to remove members from their membership roll arbitrarily. These new membership numbers were then reported to the national church. The new numbers first began to be reported in 1966, just over three years after the General Council’s policy change. That’s the year membership numbers started to decline.

The United Church, in the same time frame, started assessing churches for support of the internal church structure, based on, you guessed it, the number of people on the church roll. Congregations purged their membership rolls to reduce their assessments as much as possible.

The final piece was the changing nature of Canadian society, starting in the 1950s, which began to disconnect the Christian church and the dominant culture.

It could be described as a perfect storm. Changing society and two administrative decisions brought about, I suggest, the perceived decline of Canada’s largest Protestant church. Not policy nor theology, but some simple administrative decisions coupled with a radical change in Canadian society.

I take the work of Clarke and Macdonald seriously. And knowing how congregations think, the administrative decision explanation makes sense.

If there is anything positive, it is that no church should beat itself up for decisions made in good faith. No one saw the consequences of those decisions. That Canadian churches did not see the changes in the larger society and adapt, is, I think, the more significant point.