Loading ...Q. How much is ‘a handful’ of Episcopalians? A. 203,472
flockwoodWhen Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori talks about the ongoing schism in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, she often downplays it’s size and significance.
“A handful of our church leaders are still upset” she told a Vermont audience in Sep. 2007.
A “handful of primates” oppose the Episcopal Church’s positions on homosexuality, she told the New York Times in Feb. 2007.
Only “a handful of congregations” are leaving the Episcopal Church, she told the Associated Press in Dec. 2006.
Other than “a handful of bishops” and “some clergy” and “a handful of primates”, there’s little opposition to her denomination’s left-ward march, Jefferts Schori told the Boston Globe in April 2007.
The naysayers are a “handful of archbishops”, she told a Florida audience in April 2008.
So, how much is a handful? There are a few clues in Episcopal Fast Facts 2007, which were recently posted on the denomination’s website.
According to statisticians, the Episcopal Church lost 9 percent of its active members between 2002 and 2007. The decline in attendance is even higher. During the past five years, average Sunday attendance fell 14 percent.
In 2002, membership stood at 2,320,221. It’s now 2,116,749, a drop of 203,472. Five years ago, Sunday attendance averaged 846,640. It now stands at 727,822, a drop of 118,818.
The ‘handful’ of people who have left the Episcopal Church since 2002 = one out of every seven churchgoers.
October 29th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Episcopalians have big hands, so a handful of us is more than you may think. What Jefforts-Schori is saying is that the vast majority of Episcopalians are quite happy with the way the church is going. If church attendance has dropped 14% over the last few years, I suspect that most of that decrease has nothing to do with the current crisis. As this blog has reported, all of the mainstream denominations have suffered a loss in church attendance and membership.
The other thing is that you wonder where these drops are occurring. My own parish in Lexington is quite sound, and if anything, has increased its membership over the past ten years or so. But then again, we’re in Episco-heaven, a mid-sized, mid-southern city with a well educated and fairly wealthy population. On the other hand, the Diocese of Lexington has hardly been a world beater in its efforts to reach out to Eastern Kentucky or to establish new congregations. But its churches in urban areas and mid-sized (for Kentucky) towns appear to be sound. We’ve had two parishes in Central Kentucky leave and join the schismatics. Of these, St. John’s in Versailles was a true loss. It was a real, classic, old fashioned Episcopal parish that had produced a bishop and welcomed the Queen of England (still the titular head of the Anglican Communion) to worship there. The Church of the Apostles in Lexington was a start-up group of people who weren’t all that orthodox to begin with, so it feels like less of a loss. The loss of two parishes, one questionable anyway, in the heart of Central Kentucky, traditional Episcopal territory, is no more than a handful, though one hates to lose people, even a handful at a time.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Caleb,
Between 1997 and 2002, average Sunday attendance in the Episcopal Church actually increased, so the argument that this drop was 1.) inevitable and 2.) almost completely unrelated to the current crisis is suspect. You may be 100 percent right, but I’d want to see some data to back up your hypothesis.
October 30th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
As usual, Frank, I don’t have any data, only questions. I wonder what percentage of the losses in attendance or membership is actually represented by congregations leaving the communion. In other words, if a Diocese reports a 10% drop in attendance, is that because a few parishes, making up 10% of its membership, has left, or does it represent a few people leaving each congregation?
I don’t know, but my firm impression is that, other than the schismatics themselves, very few people in the Episcopal Church are dissatisfied with the course the church is taking. There may well be enough schismatics to form the handful described by Jefferts-Schori, but it doesn’t feel like it to me. But like you, Frank, I’d love to see data on it.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
All of these stories where Katharine Jefferts Schori is quoted, use your typical declension news topos. In Mark Silk’s book Unsecular Media, he says “just as the existing religious establishments are always doomed to decline, just as the latest generation always seems worse than the one before, so there is always the hope, the promise, the necessity of a religious revival just around the corner.” They are writing about the Episcopalians in decline, but just as every other religion is going to fluctuate so are their members. This is a normal phenomenon of religions and in this case it is just dramatically played out in the media.