The Rev. Molly James, interim executive officer of General Convention, celebrated a 10.69 percent increase in average Sunday attendance across the Episcopal Church while reviewing 023 Parochial Report results with members of Executive Council on November 8. She also said the church’s long-term membership decline showed signs of plateauing.
Average attendance is nearly back to where it would have been expected to be in 2019, given the gradual rate of decline — a sign, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe told council members, “that what we’re looking at now is a truly post-pandemic church.”
The Parochial Report, an annual data submission by all congregations that dates back to 1804, is formally received and approved each year by Executive Council. The Office of General Convention oversees the report, though its contents are determined by the House of Deputies Committee on the State of the Church.
Presiding Bishop Rowe, a self-described “data guy,” spoke up often during the presentation to draw attention to key insights, which were also outlined in an analysis document prepared, as in 2023, by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.
James pointed out that 2023’s increase merely restores this important congregational vitality measure to the generally declining trajectory of the past decade. Since 2014, average Sunday attendance in the church has declined by 32 percent.
Most Episcopal churches remain small, James said, with 92 percent having an average Sunday attendance of less than 150. The median average Sunday attendance across the church, though, is only 38, while the median seating capacity of an Episcopal church is 165.
“The majority of our churches look empty on a Sunday morning. Even if that church has vibrant, vital ministry … it doesn’t look full and it can look less vibrant,” she said.
Episcopal churches have remained active in offering digital ministry, James said. Almost three-quarters of congregations offered either virtual or hybrid worship in 2023. She said that counting online worship participants has been challenging, but that the 2024 Parochial Report form will provide a more specific metric for these numbers.
James also pointed out that Episcopalians are increasingly concentrated in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. Provinces II, III, and IV, which generally comprise the Atlantic Seaboard from New York south and the southern states east of the Mississippi, account for 55 percent of the Episcopal Church’s membership and 53 percent of its Sunday attendance.
The analysis noted that the largest dioceses by average Sunday attendance are Texas, Virginia, New York, Haiti, and Atlanta (all but Texas are in Provinces II, III, and IV). St. Martin’s, Houston, remains the church’s largest congregation by membership (10,022) and Sunday attendance (1,285).
Church finances were a major theme in the presentation. James said plate and pledge giving and overall revenue both increased in 2023, even as membership declined.
Rowe said he often hears that the church has fewer people who are giving the same amount of money, but that this is deceiving, because it fails to reckon with inflation. “What’s happening is that you are just see this slow erosion of buying power,” he said. Last year’s 3.64 percent increase in plate and pledge income, indeed, fell short of the inflation rate, which was 4.1 percent.
“Part of the legacy of being pretty much an established, white-privileged church is that we are funded by endowments in a way that no other denomination is,” he said. “The market performance in the 1990s masked the actual issues in the church, and the same thing is happening to us.”
After James pointed out that the aggregate value of congregational endowments in the Episcopal Church had increased from $5 billion to $6 billion in 2023, Rowe shot back, “It’s hard to sit around and say we don’t have the resources to do what we want to do. That has to stop, too.”
James said future parochial reports will assess more signs of congregational vitality beyond average Sunday attendance, like the number of participants in church-sponsored outreach programs. The 2023 analysis noted that 372,000 volunteers participated in outreach programs sponsored by Episcopal churches, and that 92,000 (nearly a quarter) were new to these ministries.
Staff members also hope to expand data-gathering to include the ministries of military and federal prison chaplains and Episcopal schools. There have been improvements to simplify data collection in the financial section of the report, which is increasingly completed by volunteers.
“There are downward trends and challenges evidenced in this data. I believe there is also much cause for hope. You might note that challenges of decline are not new to the Episcopal Church or to Christianity,” James said.
“It’s an opportunity for transformation, particularly because we have such tremendous resources — financial, resources, human — to meet the needs of the communities in which we already planted and in those who do not yet have an Episcopal presence,” she added.
“We know what people are seeking, especially after the isolation and loss of COVID. They’re seeking community. They’re seeking meaning-making, hospitality, love, connection. And those are the attributes of our communities.”
