Delegates at the 170th convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri learned on Friday afternoon that one of the mission churches in Lake St. Louis had become a parish. About 75 members of the Church of the Transfiguration were on hand to provide a presentation of the mission’s history and the work it took to become a parish.
“We started out with about a dozen members,” said Mary Ruth, a longtime member of the newly established parish. “It moved from place to place, meeting room to meeting room, until we finally settled on our present building. Now we’ve added on rooms for Sunday school and meetings.”
Building up missions was a large part of convention business as 300 delegates met to discuss and review the church’s progress on missionary work, not only in Africa but also in Missouri. It was the ongoing theme emphasized by both Bishop George Wayne Smith, 10th bishop of Missouri, and the keynote speaker of the weekend, Dr. Dwight Zscheile.
From the Bishop’s Diocesan address (available here:http://www.diocesemo.org/news/2009/11/20/bishops-address-to-convention/ )…
“The work of mission becomes all the more crucial for a Church like the Episcopal Church, which continues its numerical decline. Over the last decade, our Church has lost 16 percent in Sunday worshipers. In the one year from 2007-8 average Sunday attendance declined 3.1% among domestic dioceses. These are not happy numbers. In that same one-year period the Diocese of Missouri showed a .4 % increase in Sunday worship, which continues the same pattern of radical stability this Diocese has seen for the past decade.”
Radical stability must be an emerging concept. The politically correct word is stagnant when applied to concepts like health care access and advances in the glass ceiling for women and progress in affirmative action. But I am willing to be enlightened.
One may judge it from the annual and serial reports noted below.
See…http://www.episcopalchurch.org/research_71316_ENG_HTM.htm?menupage=51354
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/Financial_and_ASA_Totals_by_Diocese_20081(1).pdf
For the Show Me State Diocese (DioMO) you can check out these…
among many others available above.
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/Plate_and_Pledge_Totals_by_Province_and_Diocese_(Domestic)_2003-2008.pdf
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/ASA_by_Province_and_Diocese_1998-2008.pdf
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/Pct._Change_in_Financial_and_ASA_Totals_by_Diocese_2007-08.pdf
Interesting data points.
Given the population growth in the county the story of this parish is really rather shabby.