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.
These stats initially were confusing to me, as they seemed too high. We’ve gotten used to seeing a figure below 800K for 2005 ASA. The trick is that USUALLY the articles we see focusing on ECUSA stats are only talking about the 100 domestic dioceses.
Here’s the RedBook data for 2005
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/2005_Red_Book_Table_of_Statistics_by_Prov_Diocese.pdf
ASA (domestic dioceses) of 787,271
Overseas ASA of 43,435
Total ASA of 830,706
Foreign dioceses have generally been GROWING while Domestic dioceses have been shrinking. See these links:
http://www.standfirminfaith.com/index.php/site/article/1839
http://standfirminfaith.com/media/ECUSA_Data_Domestic_v_Foreign2.xls
http://standfirminfaith.com/media/non_domestic_data2.xls
So, I think it would be better in the analysis above to separate out the two, as ECUSA itself does:
Domestic.
Overseas.
Total.
I think including the overseas data here is masking a steeper drop in domestic data.
–elfgirl
Well done, elfgirl. You answered my question before I could ask it.
Frank Lockwood does make it pretty clear in his article that overseas dioceses have been growing and thus the domestic decline may be worse than the figures he cites. But it did seem worth pointing out here in the comments as well.
BTW, Does anyone know where Frank Lockwood got his data? Didn’t see a link in his article. We’ve been browsing around the TEC website and don’t see anything other than the 2006 charts, from which it would be hard to get specific numbers.
Elves,
You raise an interesting point. If the foreign diocese “have generally been GROWING”, then what is different? In light of GC03, is it that the innovations are accepted outside the U.S., or is it that something besides theology is driving the down turn in the domestic dioceses?
I’ve noticed that my own parish suffers a routine loss of greater than 10% each year due to death, divorce, and disease, and sometimes moves out of town, and we struggle to make up the differences. We did lose a few in 2003 and 2004 due to the GC, but actually had an increase in 2003 because of strong evangelism and an energetic curate. 2004 we leveled off, attracting as many as we lost to the combined causes mentioned above. Since then, we have been in decline again, but it is mostly due to the aging of the congregation.
John316 your question is a good one. There are probably multiple factors at work, including age of population and demographics. However, it’s also worth keeping in mind that 7 of the Province IX bishops opposed consent for VGR in 2003.
Colombia,
Dominican Republic,
Ecuador,
Haiti,
Honduras,
Taiwan
Virgin Islands
And that most of these provinces to my knowledge have a pretty strong evangelism / missionary focus which seems to have been lost in most of the domestic dioceses.
Well, if you compare his figures with the 2005 Red Book then every Province is down, even foreign. Foreign takes the bid=geest hit percentage wise in ASA but the membership is up so I thnik they probably don’t have complete foreign numbers.
The Domestic province taking the biggest hit is 3, no surprise really with Virginia in there. Every province is down in ASA though.
I just left a comment there. His domestic numbers are too high.
To get a figure for TEC in the US he simply added Provinces 1-8 but Haiti and Europe are in 2 so that doesn’t work.
All, here’s a quick and dirty Excel spreadsheet with membership and ASA change by Province from 2005 – 2006:
http://kendallharmon.net/t19/media/ECUSA_2005-2006.xls
As noted already by another commenter, Province III (including Virginia) took the worst hit. ASA down 5.6%
For Provinces 1 – 8 (which does include a few foreign dioceses) the overall ASA decline was 2.8%
More later. This elf has some meetings. Back online in a few hours.
He has 783,965 for a domestic ASA number. If we assume that non province 9 foreign ASA numbers did not go down and subtract the 2005 numbers for those we end up with 764479.
764,479 is a 22,792 drop in domestic ASA from 787,271.
That is a drop of 2.9%.
He mentioned that the 2004 to 2005 moderated. However, 2005 was a “Christmas effect” year where the Chrismas eve service falls on the weekend and artificially elevates the ASA. Now, since 2005 and 2006 are Christmas effect years, one can compare apples to apples, thus a 3.1 % drop. Kirk Hadaway, the episcopal churches statistician, guestimates the adjusted loss in 2004 to 2005 in ASA to be “around two and a half per cent” when taking the Christmas effect into account.
Also, many readers of the standfirm blog have pointed out that churches that have left the TEC and the remnant is less than 10 persons but the ASA numbers have just been carried over, year to year.
Of course if
Churches in Europe
Haiti
Virgin Islands
ASA actually went up in 2006 then the drop in domestic ASA would increase slightly.
T19elves/Kendall+ – do you have the same .xls chart with dioceses?
I limit myself to saying this once a year, so here goes:
On any given Sunday in America, there are more people in prison than in TEC churches.
The statistics are from 815 and are preliminary. The 783,965 figure is average Sunday attendance for Provinces 1-8 in 2006. However, the actual ASA in the U.S. will be lower. Province 2 includes Haiti, the Virgin Islands and some Episcopalians in Europe. Province 8 includes Taiwan.
Thanks BBB!
Did you have just the Province numbers or the diocesan too?
Are they missing a church or 2 from Province 9? That’s almost a 15% drop which seems very odd.
According to the preliminary numbers, membership in Province 9 climbed slightly from 71,722 in 2005 to 72,084 in 2006. However, average Sunday attendance dropped sharply, from 24,130 in 2005** to 20,723 in 2006.
The statistical report for 2005 included the following asterisk: ** Data for the Diocese of Taiwan are for 2003 rather than 2005 and do not include any financial information. Data for Colombia, Central Ecuador and Venezuela [which are in Province 9 are for 2004 rather than 2005.]
I think before everyone leaps to conclusions about how liberalism has ruined the church, it’s worth noting that many of the “orthodox” dioceses are not exactly bursting at the seams.
That said, as a parish priest, I am fully committed to evangelism and mission in the church. Too many priests (perhaps moreso on the left, but also on the right) and too many lay leaders have been worried about making church easy or they have lost touch with core values or they have been focused on business methods for running a parish.
As I’ve said before, elsewhere, if ECUSA shrinks to oblivion, we deserve to be replaced by something else with a compelling vision. There are progressive parishes that do well, but these are where the community has a shared sense of purpose.
Few people want to be part of a church that’s embroiled in bitter controversy. Few people want to be part of a church that stands for very little. We need to change both fronts (unity + purpose) if we hope to grow again.
Peace,
Scott+
P.S. It’s also worth noting that the supposed “good old days” of ECUSA growth and stability probably had more to do with birth rates than with teachings. We got complacent, right and left.
Some years ago, a bishop ( I don’t recall who, might have been Frey) observed that there are more people in the United States who believe they were abducted by aliens than are Episcopalians.
Re: +17.
Father, the membership of congregations in orthodox dioceses is not unrelated to developments in the wider church. A lot of time and effort has to be expended differentiating orthodox congregation from problems occurring elsewhere in the denomination…a distinction that is not always successfully made.
Orthodox congregations are also more likely to have had significant time aired on what is to be done about the TEC problem, and when it looks like they can’t leave or otherwise effect change, more motivated folks will give up and leave that church. That’s one reason why orthodox churches have so much at stake. In the short run, I would expect the orthodox parishes to have the most difficulty. In the long run, liberal churches are more plagued with a lack of evangelism, deep commitment, giving, and young families.
#17 Rev. Gunn, just to take an example, NC went from a negligible Episcopal presence in about 1825 and almost no parishes to a very significant presence 100 years later, with a church in every downtown. That wasn’t just birth rates! The 19th century was a golden age of evangelism and energy for PECUSA.
#20, fair enough. The 19th century was also a century of explosive growth in general. At the same time, (P)ECUSA lost “market share” to Methodists and others, as our internal conflicts (over candlesticks and vestments, mostly) and our inflexible liturgy became less attractive to many people.
#19, I’ll buy that too. For what it’s worth, here in liberal New England, we have trouble convincing people that “The Episcopal Church welcomes you” is still true, given what people read in the newspapers. I can see that in other parts of the country, perceived liberalism of the church could be a liability. Imagine what things would be like if our reputation were defined by a commitment to a holiness of living (a la the Caroline divines) and transcendent liturgy. That would play in Providence and Peoria. Instead, we have become sidetracked — by all sorts of things.
Pax,
Scott+
The biggest fiction in these numbers is keeping congregations on the rolls who have voted to leave TEC. And the numbers for 2007, if they are honest, will be much worse, given how many big churches left in the last year.
134 people a day, every day of the year, went some place else or stopped going. The number lost is about like eight or nine dioceses the size of …let me pick one…Nevada, for example. But, everything is ok, isn’t it?
I think the problem here is that ECUSA has lost its marketing attraction, which was that ECUSA church membership once was a good indicator of “success” and “upper-” and “upper-middle” class status. That worked in the Fifties; it doesn’t work any longer. Despite all of its efforts to become “inclusive,” ECUSA doesn’t know how to work with that reality. The PB and others subconsciously play into that stereotype when they make comments like membership doesn’t grow because Episcopalians are more educated than normal people, and therefore have less children.
Fact is, today’s “successful” people are not going to spend their money and Sunday mornings sitting in some faux-Gothic church to either pretend they are living in the Middle Ages or are part of some long-vanished English gentry lifestyle.
Sorry to be cruel, but that’s how I see it. A lot of ECUSA was always about selling appearances, not substance. That has come back to bite them bigtime, because they no longer have a product they can market.
#12/#15, to our knowledge the diocesan numbers aren’t out yet. Once they are out, we will produce a spreadsheet with the diocesan data.
#22, I think many of the really big parishes you’re thinking of (Christ Church Plano, the Falls Church, Truro…) are all counted as leaving in 2006. I’m not denying that the losses have continued in 2007, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the losses decreased slightly compared with 2006 losses. I think much of 2007 has been a holding pattern for many after the Dar el Salaam Communique, out of a willingness to honor the Sept 30th deadline.
I believe that with the Common Cause process now launched, and the New Orleans HoB meeting such a disaster for the orthodox, that there will be another big wave of departures. My guess is that we’ll see a wave of parishes leaving in dioceses such as Central FL, Dallas, Connecticut (the other CT6 parishes?), Texas, and perhaps in several other Province IV and Province VII dioceses. (This is pure speculation on my part, not inside knowledge).
Then of course you’ve got the matter of large portions of entire DIOCESE leaving. (Fort Worth, Quincy, San Joaquin, Pittsburgh…), though given the need for 2 years of voting, I don’t know if that could officially happen before late 2008, and of course it is likely to involve a long and nasty legal battle, though I would hope and pray otherwise.
I’m less clear as to what may happen when in other dioceses such as Albany, South Carolina, Springfield, Rio Grande, Western Louisiana, SW Florida… Unfortunately it would appear that the conflict is only just beginning. Lawsuits look to be the TEC growth industry of the future for the next 2-3 years at least.
–elfgirl
“Imagine what things would be like if our reputation were defined by a commitment to a holiness of living (a la the Caroline divines) and transcendent liturgy…instead, we have become sidetracked—by all sorts of things”
Father, maybe that perspective helps define the nature of the split. I am clearly on the “orthodox” side of the divide; perhaps you would describe yourself as part of the “progressive” side of TEC. Although I would not presume to speak on behalf of others (apart from the exercise of my vocation, which is pretty much defined by speaking for others….), I don’t believe it is a “sidetrack” to follow the the instructions that God has given us for living our lives, both individually and in community. I believe that the way we use (or mis-use) sexuality, an aspect of life made by God like any other, is an indication of whether we are willing to follow God’s Word, to the exclusion and subordination of the many other selfish ways that our fallen nature might otherwise take us. If we do not attempt to follow God’s Word in a way that is expressed practically in how we live our lives, then our “holiness of living” is an empty gesture, and our purportedly “transcendant” liturgy is just play-acting.
elfgirl, the Virginia 12 left in December 2006, so their ASA wouldn’t really have an impact until 2007. Plus, apparently TEC has been copying 2005 data into 2006 for a lot of the departing parishes in litigation. Because the data has now been pulled from the website, it’s impossible to confirm. Christ Church Plano left in January 2007.
#27 Reason & Revelation,
Until we see the diocesan figures, it will be hard to tell what parishes are included or not. It appears Virginia has already pulled Falls & Truro et al from the 2006 data given that they’re not showing in the charts. If Province 3 has a 2006 drop of 5.6% ASA and isn’t already counting the departure of Falls, Truro and the other VA parishes, then indeed “815, we have a problem.”
Similarly, Dallas no longer lists Christ Church Plano in the charts, so I’m assuming the data is gone. Odd since as you note, they WERE part of the diocese for 2006.
It’s all so confusing. You’ve got parishes like the 3 Los Angeles parishes that left in 2004 still showing up in the data with totally fabricated numbers. Then you’ve got parishes which SHOULD be in the yearly data “disappeared” — it’s getting harder and harder to trust these data.
Bishop Andrus once told me that it would be fine with him if everyone left TEC but him. In other words, he did not believe in the Great Commission.
True.
bl
Father Scott, by Kirk Hadaway’s analysis, orthodox churches are the least likely to be growing. They buck the trend somewhat if they are located in a Network dioceses. However, the orthodox churches in a liberal diocese do worst of all. It sounds like that is the circumstances of your parish.
Query Elves –
Isnt this the second year for San Joachim? Also couldn’t Ft Worth Quincy and Pittsburg move up their conventions after Jan 1?
I agree that the Episcopal “brand” is badly tarnished. On three occasions, by people who to my knowledge have never met, when I said I was episcopalian they answered with some variation of “but I thought you were Christian?” The folks in question were lapsed RC/Megachurch, Presbytyrian, and Lutheran (not sure if Missouria Synod or ELCA). They were teasing me, but that idea is out there, that TEC is the church for rich white liberal snobs who like pretty music but don’t really believe in God. I’m not saying it’s accurate, just saying it’s one more thing to work against.
# 29 Bob,
I commented on Andrus’s blog that if we could all trod our own path and all everybody needed to do was get along, then I didn’t see the point of parishes paying assessments to support bishops and diocesan staff with nothing to do but comment on how well everybody is getting along. He didn’t seem to like the idea.
#32–I’m afraid I’m one of the people you’re talking about. Several years ago I was approached by an acquaintance to be on the board of the local Episcopal Youth Camp and Retreat. I don’t think he knew I was an ex-Episcopalian. Anyway, he asked whether I would be interested in being on the board and I didn’t have to be Episcopalian or even particularly religious. Unfortunately, I told him because of my religious beliefs as a Christian I didn’t feel comfortable being involved with an organization connected with the Episcopal Church. I tried to be as nice as possible when I said that, but I think he was really shocked. He’s never brought it up again.
In case anyone is still reading this thread, I had a chance today to do a bit more number crunching/analysis to help a friend who needed numbers. I compared 2002 – 2006 figures for Membership and ASA for ECUSA’s domestic dioceses.
2002 Domestic Members: 2,320,221
[url=http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/Active_Members_by_Domestic_Province__Diocese_95-05.pdf][source][/url]
2006 Domestic Members: 2,156,043
[Source: Lockwood’s 2006 data above for Province 1-8 subtracting out [b]2005[/b] data for Haiti, Europe, Virgin Islands, Micronesia & Taiwan]
Decline: 164,178 = 7.1% decline
2002 ASA: 846,640
2006 ASA: 764,660
Change: 81,980 decline of 9.7%
2002 data is [url=http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/Average_Sunday_Attendance_1995-05_by_Domestic_Diocese.pdf]here[/url]
2006 data is calculated from Lockwood’s data as described above for membership, subtracting 2005 overseas dioceses’ ASA.
The figures are obviously still rough since we don’t yet have 2006 data broken down for Haiti, Virgin Islands, Europe, Taiwan & Micronesia. But they give a pretty good idea of magnitude. Of course when updated data is available, we’ll revise our figures.
Elves,
It is beginning to border on obscene and you haven’t even really had a formal schism yet. Polls conducted showed that there were 50 million RC in the US, half of which attended church. What is happening over the last four years to TEC would be the equivelent of over 500,000 stopping going to mass EACH year. Does anyone think for a moment that if the US RC Bishops had done something to cause such a drop they wouldn’t be doing WHATEVER is possible to reverse it or at least stop it? TEC’s answer is maybe more people should go.
It is shear lunacy not leadership.
81,980 drop in ASA amounts to 820 churches, at average of 100 ASA per church, leaving in 4 years!!!!
“On any given Sunday in America, there are more people in prison than in TEC churches” —Franksta [#13]
Prison and jail ASA is almost three times ECUSA’s ASA.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm