The US Episcopal Church reports that attendance has fallen 16 per cent over the past five years with the number of Episcopalians dropping below two million.
According to statistics released last week, the number of Episcopalians fell from 2,006,343 in 2009 to 1,951,907 in 2010. Over the last 10 years the Church lost 16 per cent of its members, while the rate of decline for the past five years was 11 per cent.
After holding steady in the 1990s membership and attendance began to drop in the wake of the controversies surrounding the consecration of the Church’s first [non-celibate] gay bishop. Over the last 10 years attendance has fallen by 23 per cent to 657,831.
“While the national leadership is overwhelmingly very liberal in its views, the denomination’s members are equally divided between liberals and conservatives.”
The problem was that the leadership (smugly? self-righteously?) assumed they knew best and failed to accommodate the two wings of the denomination. TEC did a better job in the past of including High Church and Low Church and Broad Church. That spirit of inclusion broke down for reasons historians will have to investigate in the future–if any historians deem it worthwhile to devote their attention to the post-2000 history of TEC and other oldline denominations. (I won’t be one of them.)
Figures don’t lie, and looking at declining businesses and extrapolating to this church situation, the real position will be much worse than the historic figures quoted, with an accelerating rate of decline. Generally, by the time one becomes aware of a problem, it is almost too late to do anything about it, without a major effort and change of course.
But that doesn’t seem to be on the cards; the latest ENS spin on these figures show that denial continues to be the order of the day. It looks like the house of cards is coming down, and that is a sad but it appears inevitable. The situation will become critical because of this hidden acceleration as the impact of the real situation bites.
The irony is that liberal Catholics want the Roman Catholic Church to copy every left-wing nostrum the media and academia rants and raves the Church should follow— or die. But doing such hasn’t helped the Episcopal Church–only dug it a deeper hole at an accelerating speed. Far better for the Church to stand its ground and thereby stand for something–like the Bible and traditional Christian morality.
Pageantmaster alludes to the ENS article [url=http://www.episcopalchurch.org/80263_130420_ENG_HTM.htm ]Episcopal Church membership shows some regional growth, overall decline[/url]. I looked at the supposed “regional growth” and it was for dioceses that showed an increase in membership. The attendance for these “growing dioceses” are as follows:
Alabama 0.4%
Arkansas 0.5%
Atlanta -1.9%
Central Gulf Coast -4.3%
East Carolina -0.4%
Iowa -4.4%
Kentucky -1.2%
Montana -0.2%
Massachusetts -1.6%
Mississippi -1.1%
Navajoland -0.5%
North Dakota -4.1%
Northwest Texas -3.7%
Oklahoma 0.0%
Pittsburgh -4.2%
Wyoming -7.1%
Some of these are obviously rapidly declining and some are basically treading water. None should be described as “growing”.
Yss, TEC is in deep, deep trouble, and things are apt to get much worse before they get better (if they ever do). In so many ways, TEC reminds me of the sad fate of the Titanic, which was supposedly unsinkable. But the reckless captain and steamship line owners chose to ignore the warnings about icebergs in the area, and charged full speed ahead.
The main reason why things are virtually certain to get much, much worse is that the equally reckless leaders of TEC are showing no signs of repentance, or even caution. They have crossed the Rubicon, and there’s no turning back from their pro-gay, highly politicized agenda that substitutes their new gospel of inclusivity for the authentic biblical gospel.
I’m afraid that many of my former colleagues in TEC still are under the delusion that TEC can continue indefinitely to decline slowly and steadily, as it basically has for the last four decades. But that is merely a convenient fantasy, to prop up their denial. For at a certain point, TEC just loses critical mass, and the gentle slope of declining at 2-4% a year, turns into a virtual fall off a cliff.
The mean ASA (Average Sunday Attendance) is now just 65 nationwide, which is perilously close to the point where many churches just can’t afford a full-time priest and are forced to cut back on pastoral services, or merge with nearby congregations, etc. Those kinds of common developments usually cause decline to snowball and accelerate rapidly.
But perhaps most worrisome is the endless, relentless climb in the average age of both clergy and parishioners in TEC. At some point you reach a tipping point, where the steady decline in membership and attendance just plummets. The national median age of the general population in the USA is about 35. But the median age for TEC clergy is about 58, and roughly the same goes for the laity. What happens when the median age in TEC hits 65? 70? 75? It’s a disastrous trajectory.
It’s a classic vicious cycle. The more TEC promotes its gay-friendly agenda, the more it becomes unattractive to young families with children to raise. And likewise, the older and grayer TEC gets in general, the less attractive it becomes to young families, for obvious reasons.
Alas, the Titanic is going down to the bottom. The hull has been pierced in too many places. Not that it will disappear entirely, of course (all analogies eventually break down). But whatever remnant of the once proud TEC remains in the future, it will be only a pale reflection or hollow shell of its former self. Like the ultra-liberal UCC, which has also been imploding for decades, TEC is doomed, humanly speaking, to shrink into virtual oblivion.
Send out the SOS. A once great denomination that ought to have been unsinkable is taking on water fast. Fortunately, we now know that there will there be a [i]Carpathia[/i] around to rescue the people in the lifeboats (ACNA, AMiA etc). But one of the tragedies in this sad, preventable scenario is that, as with the Titanic, there just aren’t enough lifeboats (orthodox congregations).
Alas, [i]”How are the mighty fallen!”[/i]
David Handy+
I’ll bet that the “under 2 million” is really a lot lower. If you look at the charts, at least two of the So. Ca. churches that left in 2004 are still listed as ASA and Baptisms though no $$ are listed. For someone who has time on his hands, it might prov interesting to take a list of disassociated churches and see how many people are still listed as members/ASA/Baptisms.