How to run a membership audit

Name the people before you name the members. The Discipline distributes this work deliberately, and an audit that runs through one person is both slower and out of order.

• The membership secretary, named by the charge conference, keeps the records under the pastor’s direction and reports at least annually to the church council (¶234).
• The church council appoints a committee to audit the membership record and submit its report annually to the charge conference (¶231). The council is also the body that visits resident members who have drifted (¶228.2.b(1)).
• The pastor and the evangelism ministry chairperson together make any recommendation to remove a name (¶228.2.b(4)).
• The charge conference takes the actual vote, one name at a time.

One practical note about timing. The longest path runs two years, so a name entered this fall reaches a vote two charge conferences from now. That is an argument for starting, not for waiting.

Print it, export it, or write it out. Any form works. If you plan to use the worksheets on this site, the only column that is genuinely required is a name; everything else is optional and simply lets the worksheet check more for you.

If your system will give you more, these are the fields worth pulling, because they are the ones ¶230.1 says a membership record must contain: name, date and place of birth, address, date of baptism with officiating pastor and sponsors, date of confirmation or profession of faith, transfer in with date and sending church, transfer out with date and receiving church, date and reason of any removal or withdrawal, date of restoration, and date of death with funeral and burial details.

Add whatever your system knows about recent contact — last attendance, last gift, last email that did not bounce. The Discipline does not require those, but they are how you will sort the list.

Before any question of removal, make sure the list you are auditing is the list that gets reported. Several kinds of people commonly sit in a church’s main database who do not belong in its professing membership count.

• Baptized members are a separate roll. ¶215 gives two forms of membership, baptized and professing, and treats the professing roll as the statistical membership. Every removal procedure in this guide is written for professing members. A baptized member who never professed and rarely attends is not a candidate for removal; they remain on the baptized roll.
• Affiliate and associate members belong to someone else’s count. ¶227 lets a person living temporarily at a distance enroll as an affiliate member of a nearby United Methodist church, or as an associate member if they come from another denomination. They get fellowship, pastoral care, and even office — but the paragraph is explicit that the person “shall be counted and reported as a professing member of the home church only.” ¶230.4 and ¶230.5 want these on their own rolls.
• The constituency roll is not membership. ¶230.3 describes a roll of people who are not members — unbaptized children, youth and adults not on the membership record, and others for whom the church has pastoral responsibility. Useful list, different list.
• Check where your clergy are counted. ¶602.1 places clergy membership in the annual conference. If appointed clergy have ended up inside your local professing count, that is worth resolving with your district superintendent before the statistical report goes in.

Work the easy paths first. Each one below resolves in weeks rather than years, and clearing them tells you how much genuinely difficult work is left.

¶228.2.b describes three situations. They share a two-year rhythm and a single ending, but the required contact is different in each, and using the wrong one leaves the record open to challenge.

¶228.2.b(10) is where the Discipline says plainly that removal does not end the church’s obligation. It recommends keeping a list of the names removed, and asks the church council to provide for a review of that list at least once a year. After the review, the pastor or the commission on evangelism is to contact those on it, in person or otherwise.

The last sentence is the one worth acting on: the names and addresses of people who have moved outside the local church’s area should be sent to churches in their new communities, so those churches can visit and minister to them. That is a handoff of pastoral responsibility to someone positioned to carry it, which is a different thing from trying to win anyone back.

¶231 has two halves, and most churches do neither. The pastor reports to the charge conference annually the names of people received into membership and the names removed since the last charge conference, indicating how each was received or removed. Separately, the church council appoints a committee to audit the membership record and submit that report annually to the charge conference.

¶233.2 adds that the pastor reports annually to the annual conference the total professing membership as shown on the membership records. That is the number the audit is protecting. If the roll and the report disagree, the report is wrong.

The reconciliation worksheet checks the arithmetic behind that number: the count you started the year with, plus everyone received, minus everyone removed, should equal the count you end with. When it does not, the gap is nearly always a record with a missing date or a missing reason.

¶242 sets out how someone comes back, and it is worth reading before you start removing names, because it changes what removal means. A person whose name was removed by withdrawal, by charge conference action, or by trial court may ask to be restored. Someone recorded as withdrawn after joining another denomination may be restored by reaffirming the baptismal vows when that denomination will not transfer membership. Someone who withdrew at their own written request may return and become a professing member again on reaffirmation. Someone removed by charge conference action may be restored at their request on reaffirmation. Even a person who withdrew under charges may ask to return, and be restored on evidence of a renewed life, approval of the charge conference, and reaffirmation.

Every one of those routes depends on the record having been kept. That is the practical reason the Discipline insists on retention, and the reason the next section matters more than it sounds like it should.

This site does not care which church management system you use, and it cannot tell you where the menus are in yours. What follows applies to all of them, and to a filing cabinet.

Nothing above requires a computer. Print the professing roll. Put a mark beside each name for the path it belongs to: died, joined elsewhere, asked to transfer, moved and reachable, or none of these. Handle the first four as described. Write the leftover names into the charge conference minutes this year and next, keep a notebook of the visits and letters with dates, and bring them to a vote in the second year.

The minutes are the record that matters anyway. The worksheets on this site keep the same log in a form you can hand to the next membership secretary, and they will refuse to do anything the paragraphs do not allow, but they are a convenience rather than a requirement.