We’ve created an Excel Spreadsheet with the details of the Duncan Deposition Vote. This way you can sort the results by diocese, name, vote, position, etc.

http://kendallharmon.net/t19/media/Duncan_Deposition_Vote.xls

———————–
Update:
We’ve revised the spreadsheet this morning to add a few more absent diocesans we missed last night, and to clarify which dioceses are vacant. The second and third pages of the spreadsheet are entirely new.

The second page lists every TEC diocese, and how the bishops in that diocese voted.

The third page was my attempt, using Louie Crew’s House of Bishops data, to list the TOTAL number of bishops that were entitled to vote at the HoB meeting. If my understanding is correct, I came up with 290 eligible bishops. Only 127 bishops attended the HoB meeting, not even 50% of eligible bishops.

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

The revised table makes one thing clear: the diocesan bishops of ONLY 56 TEC dioceses — exactly 50% of the 112 TEC dioceses — voted YES to depose Duncan. The bishops of the remaining 56 dioceses either voted No, abstained, were absent, or the see of the diocese was vacant.

Also, something else is very striking, a few dioceses had extraordinary of 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 quetions welcomed, but I’ll be traveling for 2 days and will not be able to reply quickly. –elfgirl

On several of the threads related to the Lambeth conference in the past 48 hours there has been discussion of a remark made by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori about the disproportionate numbers of American bishops attending the Lambeth conference. In this article she is quoted as follows:

ENS: What kind of presence will the Episcopal Church have at the Lambeth Conference?

KJS: The bishops of the Episcopal Church will represent about one-quarter of all bishops in attendance. One of our tasks is not to overwhelm the gathering just by our sheer numbers.

That has stirred up curiosity and discussion. One commenter did some quick calculations as to relative ratio of bishops / members. We decided to take that research a bit further and turn it into a spreadsheet. It’s very revealing.

TEC and Canada together comprise 3.6% of the membership of the 20 largest provinces of the Anglican Communion, and yet combined they have 27.5% of the total 682 bishops among these top 20 Provinces. We elves are working compiling a detailed statistical overview of all Anglican Communion provinces. Look for more data from us about Provinces, relative size, relative growth and their representation at Lambeth in coming days.

-elfgirl

-17.3%
-18.3%
-19.8%
-15.1%
-17.8%
-10.1%
-19.0%

Check it out and see what you make of the analysis.

It’s always intriguing to see which churches have grown and which denominations have faded in the past year. According to the 2008 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (a Bible of sorts for us religion writers), the fastest-growing religious body in 2007 was the Jehovah’s Witnesses at 2.25 percent.

Following them were the Mormons at 1.56 percent and the Roman Catholics at .87 percent. Compare this to last year’s states that had the Catholics out front at 1.94 percent, followed by the Assemblies of God at 1.86 and the Mormons at 1.63.

The denomination with the biggest decrease is the Episcopalians at 4.15 percent.

Read it all.

Since the election of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and a female presiding bishop in 2006, reports of dissension and division within the Episcopal Church and its parent body, the Anglican Communion, has been prevalent.

Such unrest isn’t unfamiliar to Episcopalians along the Gulf Coast.

Several years ago, parishioners of a handful of congregations in the Pensacola, Fla.-based Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast — including what’s now Christ Church Cathedral in Mobile — left the Episcopal Church. In 2006, Daphne’s Church of the Apostles, started as an Episcopal mission congregation, dissolved its ties to the area diocese.

But on the cusp of the diocesan convention next week, Bishop Philip M. Duncan II indicated that the diocese’s days of division and departure may be done.

“I think that many of the people who wanted to leave have left,” Duncan said. “I’ve had people tell me that they may not agree with everything that the Episcopal Church is doing or the Anglican Communion is doing or that the diocese is doing or even that their own church is doing. But it really is about keeping the family together and not entering into a new schism. Because what some have said to me is that when churches divide, and this is probably true historically, they divide and then they keep dividing.”

And so we have another version of the current TEC leadership seeking to defend the status quo. News flash–Christianity is not about stagnation, it is about abundant life (John 10:10). The diocese of the Central Gulf Coast has declined .5% in membership from 2001-2006 according to the Episcopal Church’s own office of statistics. From 1996 to 2006 the baptized membership there went from 20,434 to 20,723. From 2003 to 2006 the Average Sunday Attendance in this diocese went from 7,646 to 7,099 (a decline of over 7%). I am confident that during this period the overall population in this diocese grew (Florida and Alabama as entire states certainly did from 2000-2007) so in economic terms this is a real decline.

I am sorry but these are portraits of stagnation and, yes, decline. Stagnant waters are calm, but that is not necessarily a good thing (Jesus certainly flunks by that criterion). The gospel is not about being “calm.”

In any event read it all.

A diocese engaged in the Gospel mission of Jesus Christ locally, domestically and globally must be a diocese consistently centered in corporate and private prayer. It must be a diocese that sees its parishes as being part of the whole mission of the diocese and the larger church and not just a diocese where parishes are “stand-alones” living into the concept of independent contractors and local franchises. For any parish to be an active agent of the mission and ministry of the Gospel in the 21st century, it must come to recognize that its ministry must extend beyond the local, regional and domestic environment, but must be connected to the global community as well. The diocese provides the very best and most visible way in which to do this. The Internet, satellite communications and almost instantaneous email access throughout the world makes our international neighbors as close to us as our neighbors who live in the house next door to us. We must not become a diocese or a church in isolation interested only in local parish issues.

There are a few occasions when I travel around the diocese when during a parish visit someone will say; “Bishop, we just can’t compete with the non-denominational mega churches that seem to be surrounding us on every side. We just don’t have the resources that they have.” At first glance this observation would seem correct. Non-denominational mega churches have parking lots jammed packed on Sundays, and are almost filled during the week, often with local police directing traffic. Some of these churches have seating capacities of 3000. But for a moment, don’t think parochially; think about the diocese as the church. In the Diocese of Washington if you were to see the diocese as the church and our parishes as supporting congregations, over 24,000 persons attend Episcopal services on average every Sunday. Unlike mega, non-denominational churches, we are linked together by a Common Lectionary, mostly common hymns, and the Book of Common Prayer that is the same in every congregation with very few variations. When I think of the diocese as the church and our parishes as the congregations that make up the diocese as church, then we become much larger than any mega church on any given Sunday or on any given day. In fact through the diocese, we are connected throughout the Episcopal Church nationally and with our Episcopal Church neighbors in Mexico, The Caribbean Basin, Central and South America. But, we are even larger than that, and stronger than any non-denominational community for we are partners with the 77 million member world wide Anglican Communion.

Read it all.

Check it out.

Two graphs to illustrate the post below re: TEC Domestic Dioceses’ decline in membership and ASA since 2000:

Note: the scale on the Y-axes above (verticle axes) is compressed. They do not begin at 0. Thus the decline appears much steeper than if the starting point at the bottom was 0. See the comments for my justification for preparing it this way. The increased rate of decline from 2003 onwards is real however, as is shown in the following graph re: percentage change. (Which has an accurate Y-scale).

Update: Oops. The Y axis on the second graph should be labeled “% change”, not “members”. Sorry we didn’t catch that before we posted it.

[b]Update 2:[/b] By request we’ve uploaded our original Excel spreadsheet with the relevant data from which we created the graphs. You can find it here: http://kendallharmon.net/t19/media/TEC_2000-2006.xls

A friend recently asked us what TEC’s decline in membership and ASA (average Sunday attendance) in recent years meant on a daily basis. We’ve had a few minutes to crunch some numbers. (The 2006 TEC domestic data is still rough as exact diocese by diocese figures have not yet been released. We’re using 2006 figures for Provinces 1-8 with 2005 figures for Haiti, Dominican Republic, Taiwan, Micronesia and the Churches in Europe subtracted out). For 2000 and 2005 data we’ve used official TEC data found here.

2000 TEC Domestic Membership: 2,329,045
2006 estimated Domestic Membership: 2,156,043

membership loss in 6 years: 173,002 (-7.4%, a loss of 1.2% per year)

This equates to an average loss of 28,834 members per year (or losing a diocese the size of the diocese of Ohio per year)

This also equates to losing an average of 79 members PER DAY.
(The median parish in TEC had 174 members in 2005. So this equates to losing an average parish every two – three days for 6 years.)

2000 TEC Domestic ASA: 856,579
2006 estimated Domestic ASA: 764,660

ASA loss in 6 years: 91,919 (-10.7%, a loss of 1.8% per year)

ASA loss per year: 15,320,
This is 15,000+ attendees lost every year for 6 years, which is equivalent to losing the diocese of Southwest Florida or Central Florida every year. (They ranked 13th and 14th in TEC in 2005)

ASA loss per day: 42 attendees.
The 2005 median ASA is 74 attendees, so this means losing an average congregation of worshippers every 2 days for 6 years.

And the loss rate since 2003 has only accelerated:

2002 domestic membership (using 2002 as it is the year prior to the disaster of GC03): 2,320,221
2006 estimated domestic membership: 2,156,043

2002 – 2006 membership loss: 164,178 in 4 years. (-7.1%, a loss of 1.8% per year)

loss per year: 41,045 (equivalent to losing a diocese the size of Chicago or Washington (in the top 15 among domestic dioceses, every year — less than 15 domestic dioceses had 40,000+ members in 2005)

loss per day: 112 members (losing an entire parish every 1.5 days)

2002 TEC Domestic ASA: 846,640
2006 estimated Domestic ASA: 764,660

Total ASA loss in 4 years: 81,980 (-9.7%, a loss of 2.4% per year)

loss per year: 20,495
This is equivalent to losing a diocese almost the size of Los Angeles or Connecticut every single year. These are the fifth and sixth largest dioceses in terms of ASA. Only 6 ECUSA dioceses out of 100 domestic dioceses have total ASA of 20,000 or more.

ASA loss per day: 56
equals losing an “average” congregation (weekly attendance) every 1.5 days.

Of course we’ll update and verify this analysis when official diocesan data comes out
— elfgirl

According to the churchwide Parochial Report data, membership in all 110 dioceses of the Episcopal Church totaled 2,320,506 in 2006, down 2.2%, or 51,502, from 2,372,008 in 2005. Average Sunday attendance for 2006 was reported at 804,688, down 2.6%, or 21,856, from 826,544 in 2005.

Read it all.

—-
Update: For those of you who want to play with the data, we’ve updated the Excel spreadsheet for 2005-2006 which we created a few weeks ago. You can find it here: ECUSA_2005-2006_revised.xls

Please note the domestic vs. overseas data is rough since exact diocesan data for 2006 is not yet available. (We used 2006 data for Province 9, and 2005 data for the 5 overseas dioceses in Provinces 1-8). We’ll update this again when more complete data is available. For the data purists (or data geeks!) among our readers, it might be worth noting that the 2005 data cited in the ENS article and linked worksheets differs slightly from previously published Redbook data for 2005. The spreadsheet contains the revised data as cited in the ENS article above.

Membership in the Episcopal Church dropped by 48,971 to 2,320,506 during 2006, according to preliminary statistics from the denomination’s research office. Overall membership dropped roughly 2.1 percent, from 2,369,477 in 2005.

Average Sunday attendance dropped 26,018 to 804,688 from 830,706 in 2005. If I’m doing the math right, that’s a 3.1 percent decline.

By comparison, membership in 2005 dropped 35,688 from 2004 levels. Attendance fell only 2,966 between 2004 and 2005.

CAUTION: These are preliminary statistics. The final statistics will likely be released later this month.

Read it all.

Read it all.

Good to see this, finally. But surely these were releasable before the House of Bishops meeting….We are interested in you looking up your parish and your diocese and seeing how the numbers there fit with your own observations on the ground.

As is well known, the Episcopal Church radically altered its theology and practice at its General Convention in 2003. As a result a significant amount of unrest has gone on in the TEC community which the leadership has tried to downplay or deny.

It is important to understand that those who are deeply opposed to the new theology fall into not one but four groups, each of which is engaged in different things.

(1) There are people who are voting with their feet, and departing from the Episcopal Church to Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Free Church Protestantism.

According to the Christian Century, “the Episcopal Church has suffered a net loss of nearly 115,000 members over the past three years “with homosexuality issues fueling the departures.” Kirk Hadaway, the denomination’s director of research, noted that “it is a precipitous drop in losing 36,000 in both 2003 and 2004, and now 42,000 in 2005.” The numbers for 2006 have not been released yet, but they are sure to show this trend continuing, and indeed probably increasing as the departure of large portions of whole parishes or indeed nearly all of some parishes begin to be reflected in the numbers.

Also, the level of struggle is well indicated by a recent national church publication in which we learn:

“The proportion [of parishes] with excellent or good financial health declined from 56% to 32% between 2000 and 2005.”

And: “The proportion in some or serious financial difficulty almost doubled, increasing from 13% in 2000 to 25% in 2005.”

(2) There are whole parishes or portions of parishes which through different means have sought to leave the Episcopal Church but to keep their ties to the Anglican Communion through a relationship with another Anglican Province. At present, these groups are in a state of flux and in seemingly nearly constant motion but it is possible to delineate some sense of their numbers:

Anglican Mission in America (Rwanda), some 100-115 parishes
CANA (Nigeria), some 60 parishes
Uganda, some about 30 parishes
Kenya, some 20-30 parishes
Southern Cone, some at least 50 parishes

Now, not all of these parishes consists of former members of TEC as some are church plants, but many of them contain sections of former TEC folks and in a number of cases nearly the whole parish came over from TEC (Christ Church, Plano, Texas, being a recent example, in that case of a church who joined AMIA/Rwanda)

(3) There are parishes or sections of parishes who are on the verge of deciding along the lines of group 2 in some way by the end of 2007/early 2008, depending on the outcome of the Tanzania Communique, the House of Bishops meeting, and the response of the Anglican leadership thereto. Saint Clements, El Paso, one of the largest parishes in the diocese of the Rio Grande, just voted by an overwhelming margin to leave TEC on Sunday, September 16th. It needs to be emphasized that many of these people and parishes do not wish to depart, but feel if the Anglican Communion leadership continues to fail to provide a safe place for them, they have no other choice.

It must also be noted that three dioceses Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, and San Joaquin, appear to be considering moves in this direction. I am not aware of any time in the history of the Episcopal Church when three dioceses as whole dioceses sought to consider these kinds of momentous decisions. (It will of course be noted that the dioceses are not monolithic-no diocese is-and there are smaller groups within the diocese that feel differently. Nonetheless the contemplated collective diocesan action is significant).

(4) There is a considerable group of other individuals, parishes and dioceses who are completely opposed to the new theology and practice of TEC’s leadership, but who wish to find a way to stay connected to the Anglican Communion as they continue to stand in radical opposition, and are not sure what the way forward is. Two examples would be the diocese of South Carolina, and the parish of Saint Martin’s Houston, which claims the largest membership in the country and which made clear in its last call process that their new rector would need to stand solidly for the theology of the Anglican Communion and the Windsor Report.

The national leadership’s way of treating this problem is to give the most narrow definition as possible to group two, and then to try to minimize the problem.

Unfortunately, for example we see things like this:

Note on Dioceses, Congregations and Church Structure

· Dioceses and congregations remain part of the Episcopal Church even when local leaders and/or a number of parishioners opt to leave the denomination as a matter of personal choice.
· Dioceses are created by the General Convention and cannot be dissolved without action of the General Convention in accordance with the provisions of the churchwide constitution and canons. Congregations, likewise, are created by a local diocese and continue within that structure unless otherwise decided by the local bishop in consultation with other elected diocesan leaders.
· According to a September 2007 update from director of research Kirk Hadaway, out of some 7600 total Episcopal Church congregations, located inside and outside the U.S., since 2003:
32 have LEFT–and by that we mean the majority of the congregation expressed a desire or voted to withdraw from The Episcopal Church, the bishop declared the congregation abandoned and notified the national office, where the church is now listed as non-filing/closed.
23 have VOTED TO LEAVE–meaning a significant number, usually including the clergy, have expressed a desire to withdraw from The Episcopal Church.

(And one immediately notes in passing that the national church office managed to get THESE numbers updated and out before the House of Bishops meeting, but that they still do not have the numbers out from 2006 in terms of overall membership numbers. Hmmmmm. I wonder why.)

Or this, which ran in April 2007 with the headline “Episcopal Bishop says few leaving over same-sex issues”:

The Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop on Wednesday downplayed the notion of a denominational schism over homosexuality, saying only a tiny fraction of congregations have moved to break away.

In an interview, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said the congregations had “gotten a lot of attention and been very noisy,” but accounted for less than 1 percent of the country’s total number of parishes, which she put at 7,500.

“The Episcopal Church is alive and well,” she said. Jefferts Schori was in Virginia Beach on Wednesday to speak at the Episcopal Communicators annual meeting at The Cavalier Hotel.

You can see what is going on, they are playing games with numbers and categories. “Few” leaving actually means “congregations,” and congregations means congregations defined as a whole. This is collapsing all four categories into a very narrow and misleading picture of group number 2.

People know that in reality it is very difficult to get whole parishes or dioceses to take significant decisions about ANYTHING, much less something as important as this. Given the degree of opposition and hostility faced in numerous quarters from diocesan and national leadership, and given how many Anglican reasserters (such as your blog convenor) have been advocating a stay and be opposed but be faithful stance, it is actually surprising that the numbers from the four categories are this large.

The key point is, taken together the four groups illustrate a VERY SERIOUS problem. Good leadership owns the actual situation and then tries to deal with it, it does not try to redefine it narrowly and pretend it is less than it is–KSH.

Update: the above article was written before and independently of this one by Simon Sarmiento but the information seems to be of a similar type.

Regular readers of the Anglican blogosphere, be they fans of blogs such as T19, Stand Firm, Drell, and BabyBlue on one “side” or EpiScope, Episcopal Cafe, Fr. Jake, and Susan Russell on the other “side,” know things are buzzing right now. We’re gearing up for the September TEC HoB meetings in New Orleans later this week (Sept 20-25), the Common Cause Bishops’ Council in Pittsburgh immediately following, and the September 30 Dar es Salaam deadline. In some quarters, reports, responses, articles and pastoral letters are flying so fast and thick that it’s dizzying and pretty much impossible to “read it all,” no matter how often Kendall exhorts us to do just that!

But the buzz and news overload that those of us who follow the blogs are experiencing right now may be surprisingly limited in scope.

Your humble elf had more time for web browsing yesterday than any day in the last 2 months or so. It seemed like a good time to go on one of our periodic diocesan “news trawls.” What is being said in the various dioceses that we don’t hear from so often or read about much on the blogs? What responses have there been to the proposed covenant? What are bishops writing their flocks about the upcoming HoB meeting? etc. I knew from previous forays into diocesan website land that the results would be patchy. Some dioceses excel in timely communication, but many fail on that score. I expected that in a good number of dioceses the whole “Anglican crisis” and Dar deadline is being downplayed. But even I, an experienced denizen of diocesan websites, was surprised by what I found.

In the 4 hours I had free, I was able to visit the diocesan websites of 31 TEC dioceses. I focused on dioceses which I knew, from past experience, tended to have informative and relatively up-to-date websites. I purposely avoided some of the Network dioceses where there’s been recent news and statements (such as Central FL, Fort Worth, San Joaquin, Pittsburgh, Quincy, etc.) We already know these dioceses are engaged in the current crisis. I tried to hit some of the biggest and most influential dioceses (Texas, Atlanta, New York…) and also many Camp Allen or reasonably moderate dioceses, as well as to get a good geographic mixture.

Here’s a list of the diocesan sites I visited and what I found. A diocese received a “NO” if I could find nothing new about the TEC/Anglican situation since the March HoB meeting. (Legend: **Network diocese, *Camp Allen bishop)

Alabama – NO
** Albany – NO
Arizona – NO
Arkansas – NO
Atlanta – NO
California – NO
Colorado – NO
Connecticut – NO
** Dallas – YES — a good selection of background links and resources, though most not very recent, nothing specific on the upcoming HoB meeting
East Carolina – NO
East Tennessee – YES — a nice and quite current “Windsor Process” page
Florida – NO
Lexington – NOPE, surprising given +Sauls lead role in many recent reports, etc.
Los Angeles – Nothing since April
Massachusetts – NO
Mississippi — YES. Pastoral letter from +Duncan Gray.
Newark – No
New York – Yes. Bishop’s letter July / August (see p. 3), special 8 page insert in Dio. Newsletter
North Carolina – YES Big feature on “Communion Matters” meetings throughout the diocese on the homepage
* North Dakota – not really. A passing mention in Dio. Newsletter “pray for Sept HoB meeting”
* Northern Indiana – No (Bp. Little is on sabbatical, but will be attending HoB mtg)
Ohio – No
Rio Grande – YES Pastoral letter from +Steenson
SE Florida – Partial: Response by Executive board to Anglican Convenant (unclear if laity and parishes are engaged, however)
* SW Florida – Nothing new since May (surprising. SW FL is usually VERY current on news and info)
** Springfield – No
* Tennessee – No
* Texas – No
Upper SC – No
Virginia – NO
* West Texas – YES. Sept 2007 Audio message to diocese from Bp. Lillibridge

So, totalling up the YES column and the NO column:

Only 7 of 31 (or 8, if one counts SE Florida, which is somewhat borderline…) had anything substantive and current on the ECUSA/Anglican crisis. That’s 25%. So of the nearly 1/3 of the ECUSA domestic dioceses surveyed (and I chose those which I know to have generally informative and regularly updated websites) it would appear that 75% of these dioceses are not getting out current info on the Anglican crisis. This includes Network dioceses (Albany and Springfield), and Windsor Dioceses (Northern Indiana, Texas, Tennessee, and SW Florida), as well as more reappraising dioceses. Big dioceses with lots of resources, and small dioceses. I have absolutely no reason to think that the dioceses I didn’t survey are any better.

The lesson to draw from this: If you care about these issues and the decisions that lie ahead, share the news you read on this blog and others with your fellow parishoners, or friends in other dioceses, etc. Don’t assume that the dioceses or other structures are getting the news out. There are many in TEC parishes who have no idea that there is a House of Bishops’ meeting this week. If you care, share a few links and invite them to pray and get involved!

–elfgirl

Three American priests who left the Episcopal Church after it appointed an openly gay bishop in 2003 have been consecrated as bishops in Africa. They’re returning to minister to American congregations, but will report to conservative churches in Africa.

Listen to it all. In the piece, Bill Atwood is wrongly identified as being from Massachusetts; he is from Texas and it is Bill Murdoch who is in Massachusetts. Jan Nunley tries her tired this-is-no-big-deal-the numbers-of-parishes-involved-are-so-small line, which continues to fail mightily not only with the secular media as well as a number of our sister denominations which see us as an example of how not to proceed, but also with the reality in the church on the ground. When you consider the number of people who have departed as individuals, as well as the number of parishes springing up of people who wish to be Anglicans but do not wish to be associated with TEC, along with the number of parishes and dioceses still in TEC who wish no part of the national leadership’s new theology (think Windsor Bishops, Network Dioceses, numerous groups of organized reasserting clergy and lay people, and many others), you have a quite significant problem.

Indeed, even one national church study (not to mention the statistics) makes this clear:

Only 20% [fully] endorse the actions of General Convention [2003].

Now, ask any priest out there, Jan, how they would feel if only 20% of their vestry was fully behind their capital campaign in terms of whether the capital campaign would work? As they say denial is not a river in Egypt. You cannot judge the degree of opposition to the terrible and mistaken choices made in 2003 with the number of parishes which, as nearly entire parishes, left, because in our polity it is quite difficult to achieve the degree of support and unity necessary for a whole parish (or diocese) to make such a choice, AND, those opposed have differing discernments about how best to proceed at the present time.

Oh and I have a question which I bet has occurred to some of you. Now that it is September 2007, where in the world are the statistics for calendar year 2006?–KSH

Update: The thoughts of Alan Guelzo are worth recalling as well.

Interesting to see Uganda is now claiming 9.6 million members.

From the Living Church:

Two Dioceses Report Financial Shortfall
07/05/2007

The dioceses of Pittsburgh and Western Kansas have reported financial shortfalls of more than 15 percent recently.

At its June 5 meeting, the Pittsburgh diocesan council approved major budget adjustments due to lower than anticipated assessment income and litigation costs, both caused by renewed activity in the lawsuit initiated by Calvary Church, Pittsburgh. The diocese is now estimating legal expenses of $500,000 for 2007.

After the 75th General Convention when Pittsburgh and six other dioceses requested alternate primatial oversight, Calvary Church returned to court seeking through discovery to obtain copies of all communication between the diocesan leadership, the Anglican Communion Network and the Global South primates.

The original budget for 2007 was $1.7 million. After additions for legal fees and a few reductions, the revised budget for the 2007 is now $2.2 million. The new figure takes into account the escrowing of Calvary’s assessment. To cover the estimated legal fees and the Calvary shortfall, the diocesan governing bodies have decided to draw $220,500 from operating reserve; use $335,000 approved by the board of trustees from funds they control; and use $60,000 given by supporters for the purpose of covering lawsuit costs.

A very early draft 2008 budget would reduce diocesan expenses by the amount of Calvary’s assessment. The diocese plans to live within its means, according to Peter Frank, director of communications for the diocese.

The shortfall in the Diocese of Western Kansas began when its application for a $65,000 DFMS partnership grant was not renewed. Several years ago the criteria for approving partnership grants was changed from block grants which could be used to fund continuing operations to grant proposals for specific ministry projects. The loss of $65,000 out of a $350,000 annual budget was significant, according to the Rev. Canon James Cox, diocesan treasurer.

The rest of the story is here.

The question of whether Communion without Baptism (CWOB, sometimes also called “Open Communion”) is actually widespread within ECUSA has come up in the discussion of Derek Olsen’s essay on CWOB which we posted this morning. Thanks to the work of a task force in the diocese of Northern California under Bp. Jerry Lamb in 2004 – 2005, we actually have some specific data to discuss on this question.

Survey data about the prevalence of Communion without Baptism
among domestic ECUSA dioceses, by Province

Here’s is an Excel version of the table above: CWOB_data_NCal_Survey2.xls which you can view onscreen or save to disk. (There are HTML links in this spreadsheet to the full survey report which provides important background). The original PDF version of this table is here. In the Excel version, we have slightly modified the PDF original to include a TOTAL column, and we have added separate “bottom line” totals separating out the YES responses from the “YES + Probable” responses, which we believe makes the data clearer. Otherwise the data is as reported.

Note that the first set of bottom-line percentages (tan color) represent the % practicing CWOB among responding dioceses in each Province. They cannot be assumed to be representative of other dioceses that did not respond. The final line of data (green) do give an idea of at least the MINIMUM number of dioceses per province practicing CWOB.

Summary of results:
— 48 dioceses (47%) responded.
— 24 (50%) reported that they have parishes in their dioceses who practice CWOB
— another 7 dioceses were considered to “probably allow CWOB,” bringing the total of “YES + Probable” responses 31 dioceses, or 65% (i.e. just about 2/3rds of all the dioceses which responded)

Even if the other 55 dioceses which did not respond did not allow CWOB (not likely!) that would mean a minimum of 23 – 30% of ECUSA dioceses allowed CWOB back in 2004 – 2005. If on the other hand the dioceses which responded are representative of ECUSA dioceses, than we can report that half to two-thirds of ECUSA dioceses allow CWOB.

As we wrote to one commenter in the discussion thread below: We’re really NOT talking about just a few extremists who advocate this practice!

This elf encourages all T19 readers to browse through the Northern California task force report and its appendices (click on individuals’ names) to better understand this survey and its results.

======
Important Update, October 2008:

In trying to access the Northern California Task Force materials linked here, we discovered that the original links are no longer working. However, all the documents can be found at the Internet Archive site:

[url=http://web.archive.org/web/20060517212454/http://www.dncweb.org/communion/OpenCommunionReport2.pdf]Here’s the Task Force Report[/url]

[url=http://web.archive.org/web/20061019104149/http://www.dncweb.org/communion/communion.htm]Here is the link to the Appendices and other supplemental material[/url]

[url=http://web.archive.org/web/20061028034407/www.dncweb.org/communion/communion_by_province_data.pdf]Here is the table from the original report, which we used to prepare our Excel spreadsheet and table.[/url]

Don’t hesitate to contact us should you need help finding and accessing this material. — The t19elves. (T19elves@yahoo.com)

From The Living Church:

What’s wrong with this picture? What is wrong with this picture is that it is not the complete picture.

Max DePree, author of Leadership Jazz and Leadership is an Art, says that the first task of the leader is to define reality. The problem with this quote from our Presiding Bishop””and she has said much the same thing in several venues””is that although there are places of health and vitality in The Episcopal Church, this assessment amounts to no more than happy talk.

What is “happy talk”? John Kotter, professor of leadership at Harvard Business School, says that too much happy talk from senior leaders can lull everyone into a sense of complacency. Mr. Kotter states that the failure of leaders to establish a (healthy) sense of urgency is one of several reasons that organizations fail.

A survey of The Episcopal Church taken a couple of years ago, “Faith Communities Today,” asked congregations to complete a survey which asked questions similar to those found on the parochial reports. When the compilers of the survey compared the completed surveys with those of that congregation’s parochial reports, it was determined that the survey results contradicted the parochial report data. Only those churches that were growing 10 percent or more per year “told the truth.” The vast majority of churches reported that they were doing better than their parochial reports indicated. Happy talk.

The task of the leader of an organization in a time of crisis is two-fold: to be a non-anxious presence, and to develop a sense of urgency. A look at the baptized membership and average Sunday attendance in The Episcopal Church indicates that we are a denomination in decline….

Read the whole article.

Now, on a serious note, there are many small communities and South Dakota really is a place where towns just go out of existence from time to time. We are not denying the potential for small but healthy churches (and that is the defense often mounted by TEC loyalists around here – “Growth isn’t the only measure of success”).

But the numbers from the Diocese are not about small, healthy communities. The numbers show decline – in many cases precipitous. And the historic Reservation Missions are vitually empty save for funerals and drive-by baptisms. We still hear TEC folks from other places boast about how “We have a diocese where over half the members are Native Americans!” Yeah, guess that’s true on paper. But in terms of vital Christian community, well, you really need flesh and blood.

Just for fun, we looked in on Good Shepherd, Sioux Falls, a church teaching the Biblical Gospel and emphasizing prayer and strong lay ministry. Their ASA went from 42 in 2004 to 85 in 2006, and they report that Sundays this year frequently have more than 100 at worship.

Read it all.

The median Episcopal congregation had _____ active members and average worship attendance of _____ in 2004.

Please guess the answers.

If you go to the front of the webpage for the Episcopal Diocese of Montana, you will find this:

We are a member of the Episcopal Church in the USA, an Anglican Communion member province of 2.5 million members in 118 dioceses in the Americas and elsewhere.

Now perhaps this is because the webpage is outdated, but this needs work.

According to the most recent figures available, the 2005 parochial reports which provide the data for the 2007 Church annual, show a membership of 2,369,477 “in the Americas and elsehwere.” (For the record, the 2006 Episcopal Church annual lists membership at 2,405, 165). But keep in mind that the figure for membership for the domestic dioceses in TEC (The Episcopal Church) itself is now 2,205,376, and the average Sunday attendance is less than 800,000.

Blog readers are encouraged to send in examples of these or other kinds of inaccuracies, if there are such, in your own dioceses–KSH.

In 1994, when the Episcopal Church had 2.5 million members and 7,413 churches, we had 14,645 clergy, 170 members per cleric.

(As of the most current figures) In 2005, we now have 2.2 million members and 7,155 churches, and we have 17,817 clergy, or 122 members per cleric.

“How people understand religion and seek truth in God, that’s changed dramatically,” …[the Rev. Karen C. Lewis] said. “No longer do we have churches filled on Sunday with 500 or 600 folks.”

The process has included a questionnaire sent to every congregation and inviting each person to participate. Nearly all of the congregations in the diocese responded, Lewis said.

“It’s to discuss what in the church excites them, what defines them,” she said. “If it’s a passion, then people will buy into it.”

The two-day summit includes representatives from each congregation who will discuss how their church can create programs based on the priorities and experiences culled from the surveys.

“As a result, we will staff, budget, prioritize,” Lewis said.

The idea, she said, is to encourage a bottom-up approach rather than implement plans created by church officials. As of Thursday, 281 people representing 72 parishes were registered.

“Ministry occurs in the local congregation,” she said. “They’re the ones doing the work Christ has called them to.”

The diocese includes more than 19,000 people in 97 congregations in Central New York, north to Alexandria Bay and south to the Pennsylvania border. In 2002, the diocese listed its membership at 23,000 people; in 1995 it was about 25,000.

Read it all.

The executive summary is here and the full report (103 pages) is there.

I just thought I would ask. Doesn’t sound like it to me:

“The proportion [of parishes] with excellent or good financial health declined from 56% to 32% between 2000 and 2005.”

And: “The proportion in some or serious financial difficulty almost doubled, increasing from 13% in 2000 to 25% in 2005.”

Where is this from? Find out here.