68% of Episcopal parishes have an average Sunday attendance of fewer than 100. Only 4% have average Sunday attendance over 300. The Episcopal Church used to be the seventh largest and wealthiest Protestant denomination. Does anyone know their present ranking?
Can you provide a link for those stats?
ReplyDeleteAt about 2.1 million reported members in 2009, the Episcopal Church ranked 15th among US religious organizations. As I remember, this was taken from the US/Canadian Yearbook.
ReplyDeleteJim McCullough
Greensboro, NC
don't know is this is helpful or not but messing around around google.
ReplyDeletehttp://veneremurcernui.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/study-13-of-all-episcopal-parishes-to-close/
Here's a link to an informative discussion of ECUSA's travails in South Carolina:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/user/kkallsen#p/u/3/dqnWFz_Zufo
Updated figures through links provided by Charles Johnson and his Midwestern Conservative Journal blog:
ReplyDeleteEpiscopal Church Drops Below Two Million Members
"Despite all its liberal cheer leading about inclusiveness, the once influential Episcopal Church is a dwindling, nearly all white, increasingly gray-headed denomination with a grim future, absent divine intervention." -- Jeff Walton, Spokesman for IRD's Anglican Action Program
Contact: Jeff Walton, Institute on Religion and Democracy, 202-682-4131 , 202-413-5639 cell, jwalton@TheIRD.org
WASHINGTON, Oct. 25, 2011 /Christian Newswire/ -- Once a flagship denomination of American mainline Protestantism, the U.S.-based Episcopal Church has for the first time in decades reported membership below two million.
Self-reported statistics provided by the denomination this month show that the church has dropped from 2,006,343 members in 2009 to 1,951,907 in 2010, the most recent reporting year. The loss of 54,436 members increases the annual rate of decline from 2 percent to 3 percent, outpacing the most recently reported declines in most other mainline churches. The church's 10-year change in active members has dropped 16 percent.
A branch of the otherwise fast-growing 80 million member worldwide Anglican Communion, the third largest family of Christian churches globally, the Episcopal Church had also seen a steady decrease in the number of parishes, losing or closing over 100 in 2010, as well as a drop in attendance from 682,963 in 2009 to 657,831 in 2010, a 4 percent drop. Fifty-four percent of all U.S. Episcopal Churches suffered attendance loss over the prior year. Over the last decade, attendance was down 23 percent.
The denomination, which once claimed over 3.5 million members as recently as the mid-1960s, has lost over 40 percent of membership even while the U.S. population grew by over 50 percent.
A statistical summary provided by the Episcopal Church can be viewed here.
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/documents/Domestic_FAST_FACTS_Trends_2006-2010.pdf
Jim McCullough