When The Episcopal Church recently released its statistics on membership among its dioceses for 2013, the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina was listed along with the others.
There is one problem, however: the South Carolina Diocese’s leadership voted to leave the denomination back in 2012, taking most of the members and congregations with them..
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“TECSC is no doubt seeking to avoid a painful public reporting of their diminished numbers,” said Walton of IRD to CP.
“This failure to report accurate membership figures calls into question the trustworthiness of congregational reporting within The Episcopal Church.”
Seriously, TEC is claiming 28000 members in its “diocese” in SC????
An ASA drop of 366?
Did they count the spouses and children of the clergy they deposed as continuing members of TEC?
So, one assumes, they are trying to impose the Dennis canon in SC in such a way as to own not just the buildings and prayer books and vestments, but to own the parishioners, their children, and their children’s children in perpetuity?
Particularly odd, given that they appear to be using very real numbers for some of the South American dioceses. The drop of 53% in one year in Honduras would seem to indicated that in prior years, virtually everyone was being counted twice. Another big write off in membership in Fort Worth, although not reflected in ASA.
When you’ve done the things that some of the TEC leadership have done, and are not repentant, a lie here or a lie there isn’t going to add to your time in the outer darkness.
I see that I am not the only one to notice. What the CP article does not say, however, is that the correct numbers are also available from R&S, if one has the patience and knows where to look. The parish charts have been updated, and only TEC parishes are listed (and not all of those have charts). I came up with a very rough count of 3,200 ASA for those parishes, not 12,405; the Lawrence diocese reports 9,223 ASA, which almost perfectly accounts for the difference, itself about 1.4% of last year’s total ASA.