Ten days ago, we elves published two blog entries which gave information about how the bishops voted on the various roll call votes (related to Resolutions D025 and C056) during General Convention.

The first post was an unofficial tally of all three roll call votes (For the record, this was a T19 exclusive, the work of T19 readers (with indispensable help from the Rev. George Conger and the live reporting of bloggers at Stand Firm, BabyBlue Anglican and the Lead), NOT an exclusive by David Virtue, in spite of his claim to the contrary when he published our table without so much as even a link or a thank you.) The second blog post was a look at how the Anaheim Statement signatories voted.

We’re wanting to update both tables, but before doing so we really need to get a copy of the official roll call tally for Resolution C056. If any reader can assist us, we’d be grateful.

The other day, David Virtue published a link which appears to be the official roll call vote for D025 (it is a scan of a 4 page fax) We are happy to report that having compared that tally against our unofficial table, the results match perfectly.

It is perhaps worth noting that the two corrections we had made to George Conger’s tally at the Living Church, appear to be valid. George Conger had reported that Keith Whitmore of Atlanta (formerly the diocesan of Eau Clair) voted no on D025, however our review of the audio indicated a YES vote, and that is what the official tally shows as well. Whitmore is a YES on D025. Conger also had not recorded a vote for Scott Mayer, Diocesan of Northwest Texas (his vote was inaudible on the audio). We’d seen a published source claiming Mayer voted NO and so that was what we published. The official tally does indeed record that Mayer voted NO on D025.

It is also worth noting that the current list of Anaheim Statement signatories is up to at least 34 and perhaps 35 (Virtue adds Charles Jenkins of Louisiana as a signatory – can any reader from Louisiana confirm that?). You can see the full list of 34 names as confirmed by The Living Church here.

Again, please let us know if anyone finds the official tally for C056. Thanks.

I honestly cannot remember a time in my life in the Episcopal Church where I have read more mistakes in less time than in the last two to three weeks. Please do not believe everything you read and make sure to fact check and research material, a point we have stressed time and again on this blog.

A case in point is this recent piece by Diana Butler Bass. I enjoyed Dr. Bass’ Standing Against the Whirlwind : Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America which was well written and researched (and is quite relevant to our present time by the way), and so was baffled to see such a poorly written piece by her on Beliefnet.

The relevant section of her article for our purposes reads this way:

The Anglican Church of North America, the umbrella group for conservative Episcopalians who have left their denomination over women’s ordination and full inclusion of gay and lesbian persons, has long claimed over 100,000 members. Recently, they admitted that only 69,000 persons in 650 churches in the USA and Canada have joined their association. There are 2.2 million Episcopalians in the United States and approximately 1 million in Canada. Thus, the conservative group–the one that has garnered so much media attention in recent years is a very small percentage of the entire North American Anglican membership–some 2% of the total. And with their rigid opposition to women’s ordination, it is hard to imagine that this group will find much appeal with young North Americans.

Now for the record, I am not in ACNA. Certainly her description of the reason for the departure of ACNA is not one ACNA would agree with just for starters. It is over issues of Christology, marriage, the authority and interpretation of Scripture, the nature of the church, and the standards of Christian leadership that this controversy is fundamentally about.

According to ACNA’s own website, ACNA still claims 100, 000 members. That claim has not changed. The reference to the 69,000 number is for Average Sunday attendance: according to the ACNA site ACNA claims “average Sunday attendance of 69,197 (as of spring 2009)” [and there is a even more about ACNA numbers here]. So follow along. Dr. Bass suggests the claim of membership in ACNA has changed. It hasn’t. Then she suggests ACNA is claiming a number for membership which ACNA is claiming for average Sunday attendance. This is elementary category confusion. As anyone in parish ministry knows membership and Sunday morning attendance are very different.

Having made all these errors, Dr. Bass then compares the wrong category of numbers for ACNA and TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada:

There are 2.2 million Episcopalians in the United States and approximately 1 million in Canada. Thus, the conservative group–the one that has garnered so much media attention in recent years is a very small percentage of the entire North American Anglican membership–some 2% of the total.

Do you see how she got the 2% figure? She took the roughly 69,000 figure, which is for Average Sunday attendance, and compared it to the membership figures for TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada. But this is comparing apples to oranges. The Episcopal Church has not been using average Sunday attendance figures for all that long, but you may know that whereas in the 2004 tables TEC claimed ASA of 833,672, by the 2009 tables that number is down to 768,476.

The 1 million number Dr. Bass gives for the Anglican Church of Canada membership is way off. One of the recent numbers I found was 641,845, but of course, this is again membership not Sunday morning attendance. I would honestly be surprised if average Sunday attendance in the Anglican Church of Canada is more than 200,000 actually (many of you know I lived and worshipped in Canada for two years), but let’s use 300,000 for our purposes.

Now, if you use these figures, and compare apples to apples, the ASA of ACNA is approximately 6.5% of the ASA of TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada combined, more than three times the percentage total Dr. Bass gives.

You would think given the large number of errors that I would be finished. But no. She continues:

And with their rigid opposition to women’s ordination, it is hard to imagine that this group will find much appeal with young North Americans.

Well, this would come as news to my friend Mary Hays, an ordained woman quite involved in ACNA, to pick just one example. ACNA is trying to protect two perspectives on women’s ordination, as anyone in the movement itself could have told Dr. Bass if she had asked.

What an embarrassing effort Dr. Bass has given us in this article. I sincerely hope she will improve in the future–and please, do not believe everything you read–KSH.

This may cross over into editorializing which we elves try not to do. But posting the roll call tables below, we couldn’t help but be struck by something.

We have extracted the voting information for the 27 bishops who are known to have signed the “Anaheim Statement,” from the larger table with all the roll call votes which is posted in the entry below. It seems very strange to us elves that a full one-third of these signatories claim to “reaffirm their commitment” to uphold the Windsor Process moratoria, while they voted FOR one or both resolutions (D025 and C056) that indicate TEC’s intention to breach those moratoria.

Remember, as per all our caveats in the entry below, the vote tallies here are unofficial. Every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, but the C056 data in particular is still off by two votes (among the full 136 bishops who voted).

You can read the full text of the Anaheim Statement here

It includes the line:
* We reaffirm our commitment to the three moratoria requested of us by the instruments of Communion.

Re-read D025 and C056 for yourselves, and please explain to this feeble-minded elf how one can have voted YES for D025 and C056 and signed this reaffirmation. We’re clueless.

–Elfgirl

Thanks to the work of a number of T19 readers, led by Karen B., here is an unofficial tally of all the Bishops’ roll call votes from GC09.

It includes the roll call votes for:

— Resolution D025 (basically overturning B033 which urged restraint on consecration of further non-celibate homosexual bishops, etc.)

— Rowe Amendment to discharge, (i.e. “kill without voting”) Resolution C056

— Resolution C056 (allowing development of SSB liturgies and “generous pastoral response”)

— Also, the currently known signatories to the “Anaheim Statement” are noted.

The listing is based on vote by vote review of the audio files of the roll calls for D025 and C056, and also draws heavily on the Rev. George Conger’s report for the Living Church. (however the tally does not exactly match Conger’s tally. There are 3 or 4 differences based either on what was heard on audio, or other published reports of how a bishop voted.) There are detailed notes and links to sources at the bottom of the table.

Note: the totals for D025 match the published totals. However the totals for the Rowe Amendment and C056 are slightly off by 2-3 votes. There are several votes which are impossible to hear clearly in the audio files. So these tallies should be used with caution, although they are believed to be 99% accurate.

Please send Kendall or us elves any corrections. We will of course post the official tallies from TEC once they are released.

You can download/view the PDF version of the roll call tallies table here

We’re going to try to post the full table here on the blog, but that may be difficult. Check back in a little while.

Since a physical copy of this was mailed to Episcopal parishes recently, it is worth your time to give it careful attention.

The answers are in the report; give your own answers before you look.

[color=red]UPDATE[/color]: We’ve now uploaded an Excel spreadsheet with all of this data, so you armchair statisticians can do further analysis yourselves. You will find every year’s ASA data for each diocese, calculations as to relative change in ASA and in diocesan size ranking, several tables providing summary data, and 3 graphs. (The worksheet has 3 pages).

View or download the Excel spreadsheet here: {filedir_4}ECUSA_1992-2007_attend.xls

***
T19 reader Karen B. has reviewed the 15-year trend in attendance (Average Sunday Attendance or ASA) data for the Episcopal church and circulated her findings via e-mail. The results are striking:

For TEC domestic dioceses
Total ASA change: 1992 – 1997 = 2,005 (0.2% increase)
Total ASA change: 1997 – 2002 = 5,195 (0.6% increase)
Total ASA change: 2002 – 2007 = -118,818 (-14% DECREASE)

Put it this way. Look at the 10 year increase between 1992 – 2002 of 7,200 attendees. It would take 16.5 such 10 year periods (i.e. 165 years!) to make up the ASA decrease since 2002. WOW.

Data is based on ASA data for TEC domestic dioceses only.

A few more interesting tidbits re: the 15 year ASA trend data:
44 dioceses grew from 1992-1997
42 dioceses grew from 1997-2002
1 diocese grew from 2002-2007 (South Carolina at 1.8%)

For the 15 year period as a whole (1992-2007), 9 dioceses grew:
South Carolina (33%)
Tennessee (23%)
Western North Carolina (10%)
North Carolina (10%)
Texas (8.5%)
Atlanta (7%)
East Carolina (6.5%)
Alaska (4%)
Utah (1%)

The worst 10 dioceses over the 15 years (each of these 10 dioceses has had an attendance decrease of 30-40%):
Navaho Missions, Western New York, Northern Michigan, Northwest Texas, Central New York, Eastern Michigan, Western Kansas, Rochester, Quincy, Western Massachusetts

See also the Stand Firm discussion thread on this data (the comments offer some comparison data regarding attendance trends in other mainline denominations).

Note: All data was originally downloaded from the TEC website. (two PDF files: 1992 – 2002, and 1997-2007). The 1992-2002 PDF file (Dr. Kirk Hadaway’s cleaned and corrected data) no longer seems to be online. I originally downloaded it from this link.

[We elves have uploaded the PDF file Karen sent us. You can now find the 1992-2002 ASA data here.]

The 1997 – 2007 ASA data is available from TEC here.

Check it out.

Few doubt that the graying of members, low birth rates and various controversies have contributed to the diminishing numbers of mainline Protestants found in the United Methodist Church, the Evan gelical Luth eran Church in America, the Pres byterian Church (U.S.A.), the Epis copal Church, the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ.

But has the slippage become precipitous, threatening to reduce mainline Protestants ever closer to remnant status? “A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States,” said Mark Silk, who helped design the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS).

That survey, which polled more than 54,000 adults, reported in March that the number of mainline Christians had slipped to 12.9 percent of adult Americans””down from 17.2 percent in 2001 and 18.7 percent in 1990””as evangelical numbers grew.

By contrast, the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Study, after polling 35,000 adults in 2007, reported last year that 18.1 percent of adults said they were affiliated with “mainline Protestant” churches.

Read the whole article.

Take a look at this chart for one pictorial view.

According the Episcopal Church Annual of 1993 (itself based on parochial reports of 1991) there were 6,813 baptized members in the diocese of Montana, the 2004 annual lists 6,441 members, and the most recent diocesan statistics from the national church for 2007 lists 5,414 members. This represents a decline of just over 20.5% in this 16 year period.

According to the U.S. Census data, the population of Montana grew from 786,690 in 1980 to 799,065 in 1990, and then to 902,195 in 2000. The most recent estimate of Montana’s population in 2005-2007 is 946,815.

Bishop Wendell Gibbs and the Diocesan Council continued the movement of the Diocese of Michigan toward a sustainable mission and budget, which has been underway for six months, when it reduced the current 2009 diocesan budget by $450,639. A significant area of cost reductions comes in the wake of Bishop Wendell Gibbs’s announcement on April 2 that five staff positions would be eliminated.

While the greatest impact of the employment termination for four present staff persons will not be felt until 2010–due to severance policy obligations–removing the one unfilled position from the budget and tangential costs of the other positions does have an impact on the 2009 budget.

Read it all and Greg Griffith has further comments there.

Take a look.

Survey research, most recently the Pew Forum’s United States Religious Landscape Survey, shows plainly that we and most other mainline traditions are losing ground. In our case, for every seven people entering an Episcopal church, 10 are leaving. That’s not a sustainable trend.

The survey points up an interesting countertrend worth pondering. The one bright light of significant growth in the mainline group of churches is ”“ are you sitting down? ”“”nondenominational.”

We might summarize the trends the report identifies in a simple statement: The denominational structures that we inherited, those traditions once central to shaping our identity and sense of community, are answers to a question fewer and fewer people are asking.

In this era of spiritual air travel, the giant ocean liners of our traditional denominational polities are seen as inefficient, slow and generally unpleasant means of getting to where seekers ”“ and even a good number of people born into our traditions ”“ want to go.

Read it all.

From her recent visit to Delaware we read this:

She also pointed out that white Episcopal congregations are not growing. “No single diocese in the United States has grown in recent years,” she said.

If this is an accurate quote, it is an error as blog readers perhaps will know. You can look here to see the figures for yourself. I have no desire to elevate South Carolina as we have all sorts of problems and struggles here, as do other dioceses, and, as you can see, there are other places where there is growth (i.e. North Carolina)-KSH.

From here:

How are the numbers in the Episcopal Church calculated? How can we have well over 2 million members, of which well over 1 million are members in good standing, and still only have 700,000 attending the church on Sunday? If I only go to church twice a year am I considered a member in good standing? These numbers are shocking, and we are reduced to a level of participation equal to that of a fringe group.

More than five years later, tensions caused by the consecration of a partnered homosexual man as Bishop Coadjutor of New Hampshire continue to affect half of all Episcopal churches, according to census information compiled in the Blue Book prepared for the 76th General Convention, to be held July 8-17 in Anaheim, Calif.

The report, based on results from 783 completed surveys, is a sober snapshot of an aging denomination, struggling with unresolved conflict and in danger of long-term decline. It was written by the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church and included in the Blue Book report published in advance of Convention.

“In prior years the Committee on the State of the Church often heard the criticism that our church seemed unwilling to recognize the presence of a major source of internal controversy that some argued was having an impact on our common life, as reflected in declining membership and attendance statistics,” the Blue Book Report states. “The metaphor most often used was that we ”˜failed to acknowledge the elephant in the room’, referring to what many viewed as the momentous decision by the 74th General Convention (2003) to consent to the consecration of the Bishop of New Hampshire.”

Read it all.

Back in 2003, the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York consecrated a gay bishop and allowed others to perform same-sex blessings.

The Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton, an Episcopal parish at the time, disagreed with this move and severed ties. Last year, the Diocese sued for Good Shepherd to leave the church building on Conklin Avenue, and in December, a state Supreme Court judge ruled in their favor.

On Friday, both sides were back in court.

“We’ve kind of moved on as a congregation and this is almost looking backwards now. So we were dreading it but here it is,” said Father Matthew Kennedy, Good Shepherd’s head pastor.

This time, the feud centers around a will by former Good Shepherd member Robert Brannan. He died in 1986 and left behind money in a trust fund for his parish.

Read it all.

Check it out.

Some of the things that stood out to me:

A majority (62%) of Episcopal parishes and missions report that more than half of their members are age 50+.

Episcopalians tend to be older than the general population. Overall, 27% of Episcopal members are age 65+, as compared to only 13% of the U.S. population in 2008. The Episcopal Church has proportionately fewer children, youth and younger adults.

Read it carefully and read it all.

Take a look at the figures and see what you make of them.

Check it out. Note that according to this, active baptized members went from 61,859 in 1997 to 49,977in 2007 in the diocese.

Check it out.

Check it out.

Check it out.

Take the time to look through it carefully.

Take a look.

Check it out carefully.

———
Update from the elves:
Here’s a graphic version of the data on Membership and ASA change. (click on the image for a larger view)
You can also look at the spreadsheet and another graph [url={filedir_4}TEC_2007.xls]here.[/url]

[url=images/TEC_2000-2007.JPG][/url]

“I think,” [Bishop Robert] Duncan says, “the 21st century will be for the archbishop of Canterbury what the 20th century was for the royal family.” That is, an era of diminution.

Because Protestantism has no structure of authority comparable to the Vatican and because it does not merely tolerate but enjoins individual judgments by “the priesthood of all believers” concerning beliefs and obligations, all Protestants are potential Luthers. Hence it is evidence of spiritual vigor that Episcopalians in Quincy, Ill., and Fort Worth will vote on disassociation from the U.S. communion on Nov. 7 and Nov. 14, respectively.

The Episcopal Church once was America’s upper crust at prayer. Today it is “progressive” politics cloaked — very thinly — in piety. Episcopalians’ discontents tell a cautionary tale for political as well as religious associations. As the church’s doctrines have become more elastic, the church has contracted. It celebrates an “inclusiveness” that includes fewer and fewer members.

Read it all.

On a typical Sunday, [Canon to the Ordinary Paul] Cooney said, church attendance at parishes in the diocese ranges from 14 to 1,039. In half of the diocese’s parishes, fewer than 115 people attend Sunday services. And in the average parish, Church School draws just 27 children.

Data from parochial reports show that over the last 20 years, the diocese’s membership has remained stable in the low 40,000s. But during that same period, the number of pledging households has decreased by about 20 percent.

Over the last 20 years, “we’ve become modestly smaller,” Cooney said.

Despite a lack of consistency in the way membership data has been recorded, the reports indicate a gradual but marked decline in the last 40 years: Since 1967, the number of active communicants in the diocese’s parishes has dropped by approximately 26 percent.

“More analysis remains to be done,” Cooney wrote in a recent memo to the council. “However, it comes as no surprise from reviewing the data thus far that we face the challenging situation of fragile and in some cases declining membership. Of particular concern is the typically small number of children in our congregations.”

Read it all.

Do take a look.

Check all the links with the yellow “new” next to them here.

Every Province had a year over year decline.

Update from the elves:
After the 2006 ASA data came out, we created an Excel spreadsheet tracking certain key trends in ASA. You can find it here.

We’re all set to add 2007 data when it’s available. 2007 data is available now in TEC’s diocese and parish charts, only. If past years’ experience is any guide, the actual parochial data reports with hard numbers for each diocese will be available in late November, early December. We’ll keep an eye out for the new data.

I posted much of the following information in the entry below with the Excel spreadsheet of how the bishops voted on the question of deposing Bishop Duncan. Kendall has requested I make this a stand alone entry to ensure it gets visibility. –elfgirl
——

In working on putting the roll call vote data into spreadsheet format, and adding in information about absent diocesan bishops, and reviewing the total number of eligible bishops, etc. I made several startling discoveries.

1. If I correctly understand Louie Crew’s House of Bishops data, there were 290 TOTAL bishops that were entitled to vote at the HoB meeting. Only 127 bishops attended the HoB meeting, not even 50% of eligible bishops.

2. ONLY 56 TEC diocesan bishops (or “acting” diocesans, see note below) — representing exactly 50% of the 112 TEC dioceses — voted YES to depose Duncan. In the remaining 56 dioceses, the diocesan bishop either voted No, abstained, was absent, or the see of the diocese was vacant. The breakdown is as follows:

29 Diocesans / Acting Diocesans Voted NO
4 Abstained
17 diocesans were absent (TEC only counted 15 as absent, I’m not sure why there is a discrepancy)
(among the absent diocesans are at least 4 who would almost certainly have voted No (Ackerman, Iker, Duncan, Wimberly)

6 sees are vacant with no acting bishop (including PA since Bennison is inhibited and couldn’t vote)

Among “Acting Diocesans,” I’ve counted Lamb (San Joaquin), Frey (Rio Grande), MacDonald (Navajo), Buchanan (S. Virginia) all of whom attended the meeting.

3. Finally, something else is very striking. A few dioceses had extraordinary clout in the vote. A mere 6 dioceses (Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Connecticut, Chicago, North Carolina and Maine) accounted for 21 of the 88 YES votes (nearly 1/4 of the total Yes votes). Wow.

Comments and questions welcomed, but I’ll be traveling for 2 days and will not be able to reply quickly. –elfgirl

You’ll find all the details in the revised spreadsheet here:
http://kendallharmon.net/t19/media/Duncan_Deposition_Vote_(rev).xls