Do you know what percent of parishes in your diocese have, on average, more than 100 people at Sunday worship? Do you know how many parishes in your diocese now have, on average, fewer than 50? You can, and with relative ease. David Goodhew has recently blessed us with data — and not merely facts but data analysis about the Church of England. One wonders, though, whether we here in the United States are equally aware of the data available to anyone with access to the internet about the state of the Episcopal Church. At a very basic level, there is a fast facts document one can access, but there are more revealing data available. We can have a clearer picture of parishes and dioceses.
One should acknowledge, up front, that there is a smoke screen that needs to be blown away first. We in the Episcopal Church are uniquely cursed with a sense of imperial grandeur; our presiding bishop preached a royal wedding and we host presidential funerals at the Washington National Cathedral. That can give many people a hazy sense that we’re established and quite stable. But neither the big scary stats about decline (which are disturbingly true) nor the romanticism about establishment is very helpful. One has to get into the weeds — the details — about actual dioceses and parishes. As I have argued elsewhere, the mission of the church is always in local congregations.
Every year congregations have to submit parochial reports to their diocese and, by extension, national record-keepers. These are in keeping with centuries-old processes of gathering information. Historians of the middle ages and early modernity find visitation records enormously helpful in piecing together not only a portrait of religious activity but also how the questions posed to local clergy reflected what bishops and other leaders up the ecclesiastical food chain thought was important. The visitation articles from Laudian bishops in the 17th century started asking questions about rails around the Communion table and whether the minister properly wore his surplice. While we ask different questions today, record-keeping seems to be a constant charism of the Anglican tradition.
Today’s parochial report form is uniquely interested in three things, all asked about in different ways: worship attendance, money, and demographics. There are questions about attendance at Sunday and weekday liturgies and the numbers of baptisms, weddings, and burials. Then there are a few questions about education opportunities and participation for both children and adults. There are questions about total membership (a truly mystifying question for many clergy) and an interest in racial diversity. There are questions about money — how it comes in, how much, and how it is spent. Then there are some open-ended questions about challenges and opportunities and in what ways the congregation has engaged in dismantling the injustices of racism. As any rector or priest in charge knows, this exercise is largely about crunching data, but it is a helpful diagnostic.
General Convention staff have already prepared a number of helpful and perceptive analytical reports of the data. What is truly remarkable is that most of these data then are tabulated into a searchable index. Right now we have access to the information up to the parochial reports submitted in the early spring of 2023, meaning the data for 2022. Parishes are now (early spring 2024) submitting for the year just completed, that is, 2023. Yes, in one respect, it is like filing tax forms.
The searchable database is completely open to the public. The database begins with total information about the whole Episcopal Church. In general, one “de-selects” until the vision comes into focus, much like the lenses your optometrist uses to check your glasses prescription. It is very important to always unclick a previous search, or it will simply start adding data together. For example, one can search the whole Episcopal Church for those congregations that, in 2022, have an ASA (Average Sunday Attendance) over 300. Be sure to de-select all the other years and then click just 2022.
The answer is 77. There are 77 such parishes in the whole Episcopal Church. This includes not only the dioceses in the United States, but also those seven dioceses in Latin American that form province IX (Colombia, Dominican Republic, Central Ecuador, Litoral Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela). A takeaway, though, is that the overwhelming majority of those churches are in the swath from Virginia through Texas, mainly Province IV.
Raising the bar a bit more, there are 13 congregations that report 600 or more on Sunday. Of the four largest congregations in the Episcopal Church, two are in Texas and two are in Colombia: St. Martin’s, Houston; Incarnation, Dallas; San Pedro y San Pablo, Bucaramanga; San Estaban, Giron. Remember, this is based on Average Sunday Attendance (ASA), not membership. The latter number is important to keep, but is not terribly reflective of mission and ministry.
But one should focus more closely. What is happening in your own diocese? This is important for everyone in a diocese, not just diocesan staff. This is true, yes, because you pray for your sisters and brothers, join in the work of convention or, at least, people from your parish do, but also you, in one way or another, contribute to the work of your diocese financially — assessment, mission share, whatever your diocese chooses to call it. Everyone has a stake.
One can click on a diocese, select one year or multiple years, and then sort parishes. You can sort by Membership, Average Attendance, or Plate & Pledge. According to the data, of the 71 parishes that submitted in my diocese, two-thirds of them now have an ASA under 50. Only 13 parishes reported an ASA over 100. Only four reported more than 150.
Again, this is 2022. Some parishes may have grown some; some may have declined some. To be clear, I still have COVID concerns and still mask from time to time; I was horrified to see some folks indoors, often unmasked, well before there was a vaccine in the spring of 2021. But I believe that by the spring of 2022, we were back as much as we ever were going to be back. Yes, in one respect, the long-term effects of COVID still ripple. In other words, the damage is done and the “asterisks” need to be dropped in our reflection on where we are now. The people who were going to come back were back in 2022. My point is, the data does not need to be qualified because of COVID. This is where we are now.
Why, some may ask, am I preoccupied with ASA? In order to be nimble in our mission field analysis, there are other (perhaps obvious) vectors to be explored – but these double back on ASA. First, what exactly is ASA? It is average Sunday worship attendance. I have written before on Covenant about the need to avoid reducing “church” to worship, and I agree we should have a fourth category to observe in this database: numbers of adults and children/youth in education. Those numbers could easily be tallied. One wonders (with dreary pessimism) why we don’t have that field at hand. In fairness, we could consider all manner of other markers of church life, serving the poor, for example. But education participation is something more demonstrable, just as worship attendance. Ultimately, though, education numbers – children/youth and adult – are always going to be relative to worship attendance. For example, what percentage of the ASA participates in education. Raising that percentage in a parish (and a dioceses) represents more people who are more dialed in and more engaged in the life and mission of the church. Setting that as a mission goal with the aim of growth seems like a no-brainer. Let’s say more about relating other vectors to ASA by considering the question of membership.
Yes, the membership number is important to keep in view, and one can access and sort by membership in this database. But we should accept that this is a hard number to establish with accuracy. The parochial report, with its questions about how often the parish membership list has been evaluated (culled?) evinces as much. I believe, however, that the analytic opportunity, from a pastoral and discipleship perspective, is in running the membership number against average worship attendance. Most of us are aware of changing patterns in worship attendance relative to congregational membership over the past generation. A major change in parish life across the Episcopal Church (and across mainline Protestant churches) is that our “active” people are not as regular in attendance as were our “active” people twenty years ago. For example, a generation ago we may have considered an “active” member someone who comes to worship three or four Sundays a month. The bar has been lowered considerably. Now we often perceive someone as “active” if they show up one or two Sundays a month with consistency. In other words, most congregations get less participation out of the total pool. Granted, there could be outliers (the dream!). In other words, imagine a congregation with a total membership of 200 and all of those people are so sold out for Christ and the mission of the church that they are all there almost every Sunday. But more often, the membership number is much, much higher than the ASA. I would imagine a congregation with a total membership of 200 probably has worship attendance in the 70s. And, given most clergy’s propensity to count membership fairly liberally, that ratio might be charitable.
Notwithstanding the inaccuracy of membership numbers, there is an practical analytic opportunity. Could the pastor identify those folks who are “marginally active” (i.e. coming to worship six or seven times a year) and consider how they might become “active” (i.e. attending worship once or twice a month). One avenue fostering personal relationships between the marginally active and the fully active. Now we’re using data to help with ministry! One of the first steps to growing a church, i.e. adding new members, is having existing members dialed in and engaged, i.e. showing up at least a couple of times a month to worship and other activities, especially education. Who, after all, would want to join a church filled with folks who are marginal and luke-warm (Rev. 3:16)? Life is too short for that.
But even when we start asking these sorts of questions, we simply can’t get away from ASA. We always wind back to that number.
This data also begs other questions. Consider the issue of representation in leadership and decision making at the diocesan level. Should a parish that has an ASA of 9 (not exaggerating) have the same representation as a parish with an ASA of 215? We can also do some analysis with an eye to geography. Here I raise the question of forming relationships between, for example, a larger healthier parish and a nearby smaller, arguably struggling parish with the intent to grow congregations which present the possibility for growth. This has happened in Birmingham, Dallas, and Nashville. I submit that church planting and church revitalization needs to be a project of networking with healthy churches, rather than top-down initiatives from a far-away hierarchy.
Just as a perceptive rector spots where the health is in a congregation and then feeds and builds on that health, so too should diocesan leadership identify where health is in a diocese and build on that health through creative partnerships. My father was once a community college dean and an old story he often relays was the time they built a few new buildings, but intentionally didn’t pour sidewalks. Instead they watched where the students walked through the grass for about a year, and then poured the sidewalks along the “dog tracks.”
This data begs to be analyzed for sustainability and mission. And we have to start asking ourselves, with sobriety, what will the Episcopal Church look like in 10 or 20 years, and what do we really want to do about it.
The information is accessible. Now, let’s get a good look at who we are. Can it tell us everything? Certainly not. But it can give us a clearer vision.
