Happy 207th Birthday, Ohio! (March 1, 1803)

Since today is the anniversary of when Ohio was officially admitted into the Union, I thought it would be helpful to provide information about Ohio and religion courtesy of research from the Pew Forum which appears at the bottom of my post.

Yesterday, Lancaster First UMC also began a spring new member class and for this first session, we focused on the history of the church and more specifically, the history of Methodism.

In 1773, seven years after the first official Methodist small group formed in America, there were 1,160 Methodists served by 10 preachers in Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

By 1816, the number of Methodists had grown to 214,000. The primary reason Methodism experienced an incredible explosion of growth during this time period was due to our frontier friendly system of being able to establish Methodist class meetings and new Methodist congregations through Methodist circuit riding preachers who didn't stay in one place for too long but instead kept following the western expansion of our country.

We can see the fruits of this era of growth by all of the United Methodist churches in the West Ohio Conference that have been celebrating their bicentennial over the past few years.

Over the last forty years, United Methodism has been experiencing a decline from 11 million in 1968 to under 8 million today. And guess what church growth consultants are saying today about what United Methodists should do in order to reach more people for Jesus Christ? Start new worship services and new congregations to reach new populations of people with the good news of Jesus Christ. This is an example of where it would be good for history to repeat itself.

Religion (2008 Pew Research)
According to a Pew Forum poll, as of 2008, 76% of Ohioans identified as Christian.[81] Specifically, 26% of Ohio's population identified as Evangelical Protestant, 22% identified as Mainline Protestant, and 21% identified as Roman Catholic.[81] In addition, 17% of the population is unaffiliated with any religious body.[81] There are also small minorities of Jehovah's Witnesses (1%), Jews (1%), Muslims (1%), Hindus (<0.5%),>

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