Only 28% of parishes and missions reported that their finances were “excellent” or “good” in 2010. In 2000, the proportion in excellent or good financial condition was much higher (56%) than it was in 2005 or 2008 (32% and 33%, respectively) and than it is now. The proportion in serious or some financial difficulty almost doubled from 2000 to 2005, increasing from 13% to 25%; it remained unchanged in 2008, and increased to 28% in 2010.

Read it all.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Quietly released this week with no notice–a catastrophic ASA decline over the last five years of 16%.

Read it all.

(The speaker is senior VP & General Manager at the Church Insurance Company). Watch it all.

Corporate-sized congregations with 351 or more in worship represent…._____% of Episcopal congregations.

Please note the reference is to those in worship. What % do you guess?

No looking, the answer comes later.

Before I get into that, lets look at a few quotes from the [parish] report, which acknowledges “a steady decline in attendance over the past 18 months” and “Overall, our participation numbers in children’s choirs has dropped dramatically since 2008, although a slight recovery appears to be underway.” I have to wonder if any of the report readers recognize the correlation between program and attendance/involvement. I won’t point out those correlations — I’ll just let you view them and hopefully comment.

Let me say, as an aside, that this parish is not unique at all within TEC. All over the US, Episcopal parishes are trying to figure out what on earth is going wrong. Parishes are declining in droves — and many of them are in death spirals. As I shared with someone recently [edited slightly]:

“I personally believe that TEC will continue to decline rapidly, and most of the “hinterland” parishes will die. That is certainly what is happening within my diocese. We’ll end up with some parishes in Greenville, Columbia, Aiken, one in Rock Hill [which is dying] and a couple in Spartanburg — and that will be it. Our “natural size” now in our diocese is around 12 functional/healthy parishes, with the rest on life support until the older generations die out. And I think that’s the level that dioceses of that size will eventually decline to over the next 10-20 years.”

Read it all.

Read it all and please follow the links.

–Over half of Episcopal congregations (52.4%) are small, family-sized congregations where average worship attendance is 70 persons or less (2009 Parochial Report data). Pastoral-sized congregations make up the next largest proportion of parishes and missions (28.6%). Corporate-sized congregations with 351 or more in worship represent only 3.3% of Episcopal congregations.

–The median Episcopal parish had 66 persons at Sunday worship in 2009 according to the annual Parochial Report””down from 72 in 2006 and 77 in 2003.

Read it all.

According to data gathered by the Pension Fund for the Episcopal Church, in 2002 there were 13,616 clergy. Of those, thirty were under the age of 30, 195 were under the age of 35, and 399 were under the age of 40. Today, the average age at ordination is 44 and the average age of active Episcopal clergy is 54.

The age demographics in the pew are no better. In 1965, the Episcopal Church had 3.6 million members and Episcopalians constituted 1.9 percent of the U.S. population. Since 1965, however, membership has declined precipitously. The net result is a graying church.

The average Episcopalian is 57 years old. If that benchmark does not change, roughly half of the church’s membership will die in the next eighteen years. And that is as good as it gets. Since 60 percent of Episcopal congregations have a membership of 100 or less, the rate of decline will probably pick up speed.

Read it all.

To begin to think seriously about church planting is to begin to reframe the opportunities that lie before us. Imagine the vitality that would be released if two of our congregations in the four deaneries which have the greatest unchurched demographics (Beaufort, West Charleston, Charleston and Georgetown) planted two new congregations or satellites in the next five years. What new life would emerge within our communities and within the Diocese of South Carolina from eight new congregations or even twice that number? I believe this can be done even during a season of economic downturn. We often get fixated upon buildings and property. But for many in our present culture it is not the aesthetics of the building which attracts; it is the dynamism of the preaching, worship and fellowship which wins the heart of the unchurched person. Certainly we cannot leave entirely behind the need for property and buildings; a drab setting blesses no one’s heart. But if we can focus upon reaching the lost I believe the issues of property and building will emerge in many cases as quite secondary to the winning of the seeker and the transformation of his or her life in Christ. This change from building church plants to growing missional communities is a concept we need to embrace more fully. This will have the dynamism of a movement rather than the often stagnating effect of tending an institution.

The Diocese has in recent years held to the model of established parishes being planters of new churches or congregations. This has worked well in such places as The Cross, Bluffton where a satellite congregation was established at the Buckwalter Campus. So also with Holy Cross, Sullivan’s Island in the planting of a satellite at Daniel Island and their future plan of a third satellite congregation at ”˜Ion in the Mount Pleasant. Such vision is inspiring. Others like St. Paul’s Summerville, St. James’, James Island, St. John’s, Johns Island, and Christ Church, Mount Pleasant because of adjacent land were able to build ministry centers, essentially planting “congregations” on campus. There has been no lack of vision and creativity among us. Today, two of our congregations in the Georgetown deanery have begun initiatives as well. Trinity, Myrtle Beach, under the leadership of Rob Sturdy and Iain Boyd, has initiated a church plant in the Carolina Forest community. This is making good progress. The Rev. Wilmot Merchant and the people of St. Stephen’s, North Myrtle Beach with the help of the Congregational Development Committee purchased property in the Loris area for a potential church plant in the future. They are presently making a strong witness for Christ by their volunteer work in Loris Elementary School therein making a difference in children’s lives. It will also work as a relational base from which to plant a congregation in the future. Nevertheless, elsewhere we have lagged behind, and others have seized the day””God will have his witnesses ”“ with or without us.

The future of two other initiatives is more complicated and raises the question of Diocesan leadership in planting or acknowledging more complex cases. The Well By the Sea at Market Commons, in the area between Surfside and Myrtle Beach, is a “congregation” that has already outgrown its rented facilities and is at a crossroads….

Take the time to read it all.

What are:

–the number of domestic (USA) TEC parishes? 6,895

–the median membership of said parishes? 160

–the median attendance of said parishes? 66

We actually had a blog thread on it–read it once again.

*No researching–you need to guess first*

What are:

–the number of domestic (USA) TEC parishes?

–the median membership of said parishes?

–the median attendance of said parishes?

The Episcopal Church continuesin its course of a steep decline in the wake of its divisions over doctrine and discipline, with the national office reporting that in 2009 average Sundayattendance (ASA) fell by three percent to 682,963.

As of the end of 2009, the Episcopal Church reported having 2,006,343 active members””at its peak in the 1960s the Church counted over 3.5million members. The church shed 22,294 members in 2009, following a loss of 22,565 in 2008. Income from parochial giving also declined by 2.8 per cent last year, falling to £1.33 billion.

Read it all.

You can find the 2009 numbers here and the 2002 numbers there. Before you click on the link, guess the percentage decline in Average Sunday Attendance for domestic missions and parishes of The Episcopal Church over this time frame–KSH.

The Parochial Report Membership and Attendance Totals for 2009 have been posted to the Episcopal Church website, available here: http://generalconvention.org/gc/parochial_reports

The report was posted by the Rev. Canon Dr. Gregory Straub, Secretary of Executive Council, in accordance to Canon I.6.1 (listed below)

The figures are based on the information submitted by congregations and dioceses through the annual Parochial Report. The report was prepared by C. Kirk Hadaway, Ph.D., Officer for Congregational Research.

Reflective of members in both domestic and foreign dioceses, the report shows 2,175,616 baptized members of The Episcopal Church for 2009, with an Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) of 724,789.

In an accompanying report of Episcopal Domestic Fast Facts 2009 (not inclusive of any of the non-United States-based dioceses), the largest ASA was posted as the Cathedral of St Peter & St Paul in Washington DC (Washington National Cathedral) with 1667. The largest active membership was noted as St. Martin’s, Houston TX (Diocese of Texas) with 8,311 members.
Canon 6:

CANON 6: Of the Mode of Securing an Accurate View of the State of This Church

Sec. 1. A report of every Parish and other Congregation of this Church shall be prepared annually for the year ending December 31 preceding, in the form authorized by the Executive Council and approved by the Committee on the State of the Church, and shall be filed not later than March 1 with the Bishop of the Diocese, or, where there is no Bishop, with the ecclesiastical authority of the Diocese. The Bishop or the ecclesiastical authority, as the case may be, shall keep a copy and submit the report to the Executive Council not later than May 1. In every Parish and other Congregation the preparation and filing of this report shall be the joint duty of the Rector or Member of the Clergy in charge thereof and the lay leadership; and before the filing thereof the report shall be approved by the Vestry or bishop’s committee or mission council. This report shall include the following information:

(1) the number of baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and burials during the year; the total number of baptized members, the total number of communicants in good standing, and the total number of communicants in good standing under 16 years of age.

(2) a summary of all the receipts and expenditures, from whatever source derived and for whatever purpose used.

(3) such other relevant information as is needed to secure accurate view of the state of this Church, as required by the approved form.

The Episcopal Church welcomes all who worship Jesus Christ in 109 dioceses and three regional areas in 16 nations. The Episcopal Church is a member province of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Check them out carefully.

The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council has authorized its finance office to seek a $60 million line of credit to support the church’s operations. The loan will be secured by a mortgage on the church’s headquarters at 815 Second Avenue in New York, and by offering as collateral its unrestricted endowment funds.

The Oct 23-25 meeting in Salt Lake City of the church’s governing council between meetings of its General Convention also voted to cut its budget by 5 per cent next year in response to a $2.1 million shortfall in income.

A memorandum from the church’s Finance Office to the 38 council members stated that diocesan contributions to the national church were expected to be $700,000 below budget, while cuts in spending at the national church offices were expected to depress income also.

Read it all.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s figures, Utah has grown in population from 2,233,169 in 2000 to 2,784,572 in 2009. This represents a population growth of approximately 24.69%.

According to Episcopal Church statistics, the Diocese of Utah went from Average Sunday Attendance (or ASA) of 1924 in 1998 to 1612 in 2008. This represents an ASA decline of about 16% over this ten year period. Please note that if you go to the link toward the end of this sentence and enter “Utah” as the name of the diocese and then “View Diocese Chart” underneath on the left you can see in pictorial form some of the data from 2009 which shows a slight increase in ASA from 2008-2009. The hard numbers for these new 2009 numbers are not yet available so far as I am aware.

The Diocese of Utah’s website may be found here.

Another challenge on the horizon is demographic in nature. The Diocese of Indianapolis is typical of TEC, (and the other mainlines churches) in that most of our members belong to large parishes, while most of our parishes have fewer than 100 people worshiping on an average Sunday. In some dioceses these parishes need to look for part-time clergy, and a growing number of new priests need to be tentmakers ”“ earning some part of their living in secular work. Clergy are not as mobile as in the past, and often cannot move to new positions unless there is work available for a spouse or partner as well. As this trend continues, dioceses and seminaries will need to collaborate in providing a variety of ways to educate and form all our members for ministries.

TEC has been struggling over forty years to live out our conviction that the mission of the church depends on all our members; as the catechism says, “the ministers of the church are lay persons, bishops, priests, and deacons.” Each order of ministry has its designated area of responsibility ”“ but there is a good deal of overlap, which is probably a good thing. Unless we are all working together to proclaim the Good News, to make the kingdom Jesus preached a reality, the mission of the church cannot be fully realized.

We have given a good deal of energy and attention to describing and defining the ministries of bishops and priests ”“ after all, much of our ministry is so public ”“ so ”˜up front’ and visible. We have done less well in acknowledging lay persons as the ”˜front line’ in proclaiming Christ and his kingdom in the world, and deacons as the iconic connection between our worship and our daily lives. It’s a special joy to celebrate the ordination of a deacon at our convention Eucharist, affirming the vital role of deacons among us.

Read it all.

Each year, as Convention comes around, I look at the numbers you present in your Parochial reports. The figures I pay attention to are those related to Sunday average attendance, baptisms and confirmations or receptions in a given year, Easter Sunday attendance, which often gives a picture of potential for those numbers, tends to come close to total communicants, and financial health as shown by average pledge per week. The total number of enrolled members has always lagged behind reality depending on the energy of clergy to obtain a membership that represents the recent present. We all know that two in three people on Episcopal rolls never show up at church unless of course you have just happened to have culled the list the year before! The three values of vitality, visibility and viability are not really captured in the Parochial Report. I do know however that God’s impact through any particular group of the baptized in a given place always far exceeds anything we can know or report.

The apparent irrelevance, however, of the totals on baptized persons, or even communicants, for understanding our life as Church points to a huge weakness in our faith system. We are poor at keeping track of one another. This is so at the very place where we might hope greater commitment is being expressed, namely at Confirmation.

Read it all (my emphasis).

Part of the 20/20 vision had been the truth that mission united us and issues divided us. Since 2003, issues have divided us. While some leaders say we are still doing 20/20 mission, most people in the wider church know this initiative was dead on arrival.

As a consequence, we have returned to our long-standing decline. In only a few more years, the very viability of our church’s structure will begin to be called into question ”” the signs are already there. In the years that followed 2003, I have come to the conclusion that the Episcopal Church is headed toward about 1 million members in 2020, an average Sunday attendance around 400,000 and around 6,000 mainly small congregations. The 20/20 initiative was, among all things, a concerted effort to bring revitalization and growth to a long declining mainline church. It failed and we are now faced with an institutional decline that, save a direct intervention and miracle by God, cannot be reversed. There is insufficient leadership, desire, or institutional will to change.

The failure of the 20/20 initiative, combined with the subsequent controversy around human sexuality, has placed our community in a very precarious position. I am not suggesting that we return to the 20/20 initiative, but I do believe that our community urgently needs toaddress our current realities and find leaders who can point us toward a more hopeful future.

–The Very Rev. Kevin Martin in the October 8, 2010, Living Church (p.10).

In order to generate a pictorial chart of this parish, please go [url=http://www.episcopalchurch.org/109378_107383_ENG_HTM.htm]here[/url] and enter “Upper South Carolina” in the second line down under “Diocese.” Next please wait a moment and then click on “Church” and choose “Trinity (Columbia, SC)”. Then wait another moment and choose “View Church chart” under that line (the middle of the three choices).

You may find the parish website there.

I do not like the new way the website is laid out at all–it is very user unfriendly. In any event, use these numbers to get a sense of where your diocese has been.

Then go to the link at the end of this sentence and enter the name of your diocese (and parish if you desire) and you can see some of the data from 2009 (Click on the “Studying Your Congregation and Community” words under Research if you have any trouble).

Many people assume that there has been a steady decline in worship attendance for all the mainline denominations since the mid-1960s””the era when most of them began to see their memberships decline. But trends in attendance””usually thought to be a better indicator of church vitality than trends in membership””have actually followed their own patterns.

For example, the Episcopal Church re ported higher attendance in 2000 than in any year since 1991, the year the denomination began recording attendance figures. The United Methodist Church re ported worship attendance figures in 2000 that were higher than those in the mid-1980s. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America had relatively flat attendance rates in the years before 2001, and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the 1990s had several years showing modest gains in attendance.

But the years following 2001 have shown a deep recession in worship attendance (see graph below). The losses in worshipers year after year were more dramatic than what data from the previous decade would have predicted.

Read it all.

If you go to the link toward the end of this sentence and enter “Indianapolis” as the name of the diocese and then go to “Church” (the third possible entry line) and enter “Saint Paul’s, Jeffersonville” underneath the entry point (where you will see a list of parishes alphabetically in the Indianapolis diocese) then you can see in pictorial form some of the data from 1999-2009.

You may find the parish website there.

Frank Kirkpatrick, professor of religion at Trinity College, wrote in a survey article in 2008 that “there were, as of December [2007], 55 [Episcopal Church] property disputes in one state or another of resolution around the country.” (You may find a listing of those lawsuits in this post from August 2008, and see also the latest report from the American Anglican Council.) Of those fifty-five lawsuits, I estimate that ECUSA itself was a party to about half of them. Thus from the five lawsuits to which it was a party as Bishop Griswold ended his term in November 2006 (the Pawley’s Island case in South Carolina, the three Los Angeles lawsuits, and a case involving St. James Church in Elmhurst, in the Diocese of Long Island), the number increased by five times in the first full year of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori’s term.

Under Bishop Jefferts Schori, ECUSA did not just passively stand by as the property disputes emerged, and allow the diocese involved to carry the laboring oar. It aggressively prosecuted the cases in both California and Virginia, joined in filings in Connecticut, Georgia and New York (where it intervened as the DFMS against St. Andrew’s, in Syracuse, and filed an amicus brief in this case in New York’s highest court), became enmeshed in additional litigation in San Diego and Colorado, and threatened litigation against the dioceses of San Joaquin, Fort Worth and Quincy if they dared to withdraw from the Church. (The latter two threats were issued by the Presiding Bishop’s Chancellor on his own initiative, as discussed in this earlier post.)

There are no records in the minutes of the Executive Council during this period to show that it was ever consulted before any of these multiple filings in the name of the Church took place; as quoted in the previous post, the Presiding Bishop held the view that only she personally, and neither the Council, nor even General Convention, had any authority over litigation. Thus she simply gave her Chancellor free rein — and ECUSA’s legal bills began to mount exponentially.

Read it all (and please note it is part of a series all parts of which need to be perused).

In her recent address to the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Presiding Bishop used the same list that she used in Southwark, but began her address to another “Episcopal Church” by defending the use of the name “The” Episcopal Church: “we’ve struggled with what to call ourselves because ECUSA is not accurate.” In fact, the official name of TEC as designated in its constitution is“The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, otherwise known as The Episcopal Church (which name is hereby recognized as also designating the Church).” She also stated that the Churches in Europe were “rapidly becoming indigenized.” The data show that they have declined 13% since 2003 from an ASA of 1500 to 1302.

TEC is not, of course, the only “international” church in the Anglican Communion. Others include the West Indies, Central America, Southern Cone, Ireland, West Africa, Central Africa, Southern Africa, Indian Ocean, Jerusalem and the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia.

But the most international of all Anglican churches remains the Church of England. In addition to churches extra-provincial to Canterbury in Spain, Portugal, Bermuda, Ceylon and the Falkland Islands, the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe includes parishes or missions in forty-three countries with a weekly attendance of 12,600.

Read it all.

In order to generate a pictorial chart of this parish, please go [url=http://www.episcopalchurch.org/109378_107383_ENG_HTM.htm]here[/url] and enter “Milwaukee” in the second line down under “Diocese.” Next please wait a moment and then click on “Church” and choose”St Paul’s, Oconomowoc” Then wait another moment and choose “View Church chart” under that line (the middle of the three choices).

Read it all.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s figures, Idaho has grown in population from 1,293,953 in 2000 to 1,545,801 in 2009. This represents a population growth of approximately 19.46%.

According to Episcopal Church statistics, the Diocese of Idaho went from Average Sunday Attendance (or ASA) of 2,061 in 1998 to 1,732 in 2008. This represents an ASA decline of about 16% over this ten year period.

In order to generate a pictorial chart of diocesan statistics, please go [url=http://www.episcopalchurch.org/growth_60791_ENG_HTM.htm?menupage=50929]here[/url] and enter “Idaho” in the second line down under “Diocese” and then click on “View Diocese Chart” under the third line to the left.

The Diocese of Idaho’s website may be found here.