Presiding bishop hides membership/attendance statistics
flockwoodThe Episcopal Church has compiled its membership and average Sunday attendance (ASA) figures for 2008, but is declining to release them.
Membership and attendance figures have dropped every year since the consecration of the church’s first openly-gay bishop, the Rev. Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire, in 2003.
Church spokesmen originally said the 2008 figures would be released in September. But that date came and went.
In a conference call with the media this afternoon from Memphis, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori confirmed that she has the information, but wouldn’t say whether the numbers look good or bad for the 2.1 million-member denomination.
Bonnie Anderson, president of the church’s House of Deputies, also declined to reveal the details.
The church trumpets its transparent governance and its openness on its home page but it wasn’t very open this week about its numbers.
Having been tipped that the numbers were being shared with the Executive Council during its Oct. 5-8 meeting, I e-mailed church public affairs officer Neva Rae Fox late Wednesday, Oct. 7, and asked for a “copy of the new ASA and membership figures that were passed out to the Executive Council at this week’s meeting.”
She e-mailed me back that “ASA and membership figures have not been passed out to Exec Council.”
So I e-mailed back: “Perhaps passed out is the wrong word. It’s my understanding that the figures are finished and were shared with the Executive Council this week.”
This morning, she responded: “if so, not yet. nothing has been shared yet.”
That didn’t match what I’d been led to believe by a very reliable source. So I asked Anderson and the Presiding Bishop about the numbers during the press conference. Here’s what they said:
BIBLE BELT BLOGGER: The ASA and membership figures for 2008 have been compiled. I’m wondering if those were shared with the Executive Council this week and what the ASA and membership figures show for 2008 for the domestic dioceses.
PRESIDENT ANDERSON: Yes. (Clears throat). Excuse me, yes, they’ve been, um, circulated to the Executive Council via electronic means but we’re not going to be talking about those per se. Our agenda’s pretty full and we’ll probably be taking those up in the future at our next meeting.
BIBLE BELT BLOGGER: Can you share, though, what the results are?
PRESIDENT ANDERSON: We don’t know. I mean we have it written out but we’ll be posting it I’m sure as soon as we’re, they’re, approved and available. But yes, you’ll be able to get them.
LOCKWOOD: But presiding bishop, can you tell us what they show?
PRESIDING BISHOP JEFFERTS SCHORI: I, I’m sorry. I’m not able to comment on that at the moment. I don’t have it in my head.
BIBLE BELT BLOGGER: Do you know approximately? Can you give an approximation? Are they up or down?
CHURCH PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER NEVA RAE FOX: Frank, we need to move on now. Um, I believe the presiding officers have indicated that the figures will be available at a later time, but not right now. Thank you.
So there you have it. The numbers have been circulated, not passed out. The figures have been shared with the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, but the theologian/scientist can’t comment on them because “I don’t have it in my head.”
Based on the above, do you think the statistics — if they were in the presiding bishop’s head — would be good news or bad news for this badly divided denomination?
October 8th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Let’s put it this way. If the news was good, you’d have a copy of the statistics right now.
October 8th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
The churlish children lead us over the cliff.
These women leaders are liars and the truth is not in them.
October 8th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Those, um, figures, uhhh, are located next to the file of, um, litigation costs.
Wonder if they’ll get classified as protected information the same way as an excuse not to publish them. Just read in the Bible today that every thing hidden will be brought out in the light. And people wonder why we don’t trust our leadership…..
October 8th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Nice work, Frank. I checked the chart for St James Newport Beach which is an ACNA parish now, and the diocese of LA is STILL counting the attendance and pledges at the level they were when the parish left. So the numbers for LA are wrong, again.
October 8th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
There’s a parish in Manhattan that showed an extraordinary jump in 2005, by about 400 members. Unfortunately, the Rector had been boasting for some time of “building a mailing list of 400 names,” and ASA is still unmoved, and pledging hasn’t budged, from the old days.
What do you bet he just dumped his mailing list into the “membership” pile, and any number of Catholic and Jewish folk (who had signed up for social or cultural mailings) are now “officially” counted as Episcopalians?
By the way, the same Rector has been almost doubling his ASA figures—I’ve checked.
I think this kind of cheating is typical of TEC, so whatever lousy figure they finally come up with, subtract a percentage of your choosing.
Just thought I’d give the dead Diocese of Newark a rest for a change.
October 8th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
You can criticize the ECUSA leadership for not having a prepared statement at this time, but then again it would be awfully reckless for them to answer Frank’s question with an off the cuff recollection of approximate figures and trends. They SHOULD be careful with their replies to an adversarial press and public.
October 8th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
News of declining membership is heart breaking for every true Christians specially at the time when Christian are at bay by pressure from non-believer.
Before altering existent cannon of core value (from sin to virtue), Church should amend the major cannon by two-third majority vote of its entire communicant members. Church management body (council) are entrusted to work within core value of the Church same as congress is entrusted to work within constitution.
I was member of vestry for two terms in an Episcopal parish and a deep rooted Anglican. It was to my surprise rector and elected representative voted for changes in council meeting thru church politics by-passing any discussion or mandate from members of the church. They left the member one option to leave if not agree for the change. So they left. Management should not be surprised by the result. On the other hand Church forced the leaving member for a challenging position to keep up the faith. It is loss-loss situation for a Anglican family.
October 9th, 2009 at 7:41 am
I would think those membership statistics reflect directly upon the management of the church presently, thats why Frank didn’t get an answer. It doesn’t take a neurosurgeon to guess what those statistics are.
October 9th, 2009 at 7:43 am
If your goal is to try to make something out of nothing, you are somewhat successful with this article.
Personally, I am glad they didn’t say anything without having the numbers in front of them….you can never be too careful when dealing with “journalists” whose goal is to hurt, damage, and embarrsass you at every opportunity.
October 9th, 2009 at 8:22 am
Jose, where is this “adversarial press” you allude to? Certainly not the mainstream media–NY Times, Washington Post, etc.–have much problem with the direction TEC is taking. Given the very pro gay-rights agenda of the Times, for instance, I think they love what TEC stands for. Bloggers are a different matter, but they are not unified in these issues at all, so naturally some of them will be “challenging”. And I think the above comments are right: if the news was good, believe me, we’d be hearing it. (And FWIW, I’m one of those who has lowered TEC’s membership numbers.)
October 9th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Episcopal Church’s figures are down; they’ve been dropping for years. Everyone wants to blame this on the conservative minority’s leaving, but I suspect it has more to do with societal trends:
1. People don’t go to church or belong to churches in as great a number as they once did, and the mainstream churches, which do not preach hellfire and damnation are naturally the ones whose membership rosters fall.
2. In the past, as recently as the ’70s, certainly, there was still a large group of churchgoers whose churchgoing was intended to place them in a certain social group. Now, while it is still considered a social plus to be an Episcopalian in some communities, the larger gloss has worn off: Our last ethnically Episcopal president, George II, abandoned the church of his fathers for the Methodists.
3. There is a large group of people out there who have not grown up with any organized religion: The evangelicals refer to them as the unchurched. These folks aren’t going to become Episcopalians, because it’s too hard. Why should they go to a church that actually requires you to know something, and which has particular traditions and practices, when they can attend a mega-church, and have a little Christian rock concert every Sunday, and a service that doesn’t use any big words, and which allows you to dance and hug a lot. Episcopalians rarely hug, and aren’t generally good dancers. You need pentecostals for that.
4. The same things that make us impenetrable to the unchurched also make us difficult for those who didn’t grow up with us to understand. We are too Catholic to suit real protestants, and too protestant to suit Catholics. People don’t understand why we yammer on about gay rights when most other protestant churches don’t care. As far as I know, the only ministers who spoke in favor of the fairness ordinance in Lexington were Episcopal; I watched the hearings on tv, and Baptist minister after minister got up and explained that while they weren’t personally homophobic, they thought that equal rights for gays was a bad thing.
These and other factors have led to a general decline in the mainstream denominations, and I imagine that this trend will continue.
October 9th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
As my grandfather would say, figure do not lie, but liars figure. They have had more than ample time to prepare a statement about what the clear meaning of the figures show. In my many years in business, when I see a delay and avoidance like this I started plans to do an audit because someone was preparing to cook the books.
Scott
October 10th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Caleb, I do agree with you on several points. I think the Catholic scandal has hurt religion across the board. I also think that congregations that have these huge campuses have lost the message about religion and most church goers are not satisfied having to supplement the operating expenses for these huge operations in these hard economic times. I believe that your basic churches that preach and follow what they preach are going to be the survivors of these times.
October 10th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
I had a 45 year career as a statistician, operating at the grunt, manager, salesman, executive and pundit levels. I think I know every trick in the book. Without the tricks, numbers nearly never lie. So the wonder is when you get to see the numbers without any tricks. Anytime I encountered people “stalling” the release of numbers, without a rational reason like “we counted the green balls twice”, it meant they didn’t like the results and were busy composing a “spin” that would disguise the truth. But truth is not a very important priority for TEC, is it?
October 10th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
The decline continues……
Here is the information. You will have to complie these yourself.
Charts:
http://12.0.101.92/Charts.aspx
DCF
http://12.0.101.92/reports/PR_ChartsDemo/exports/ParishRPT_1082009103705PM.pdf
October 10th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Sorry that should read “compile yourself”
October 11th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
And I suspect, perplexed, that this is the fate of all the mainstream churches. I remember attending a dinner at Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church, which I attended in law school, at which they honored an older gentleman who had been a member of the church for 50 years. Bear in mind that this is a student-oriented church and most members hadn’t been there five years, much less fifty.
This fellow, who was retired by this point, had run a printing company in Cambridge and came to every church service, though he rarely said anything. At the dinner, the minister asked him how he came to be a member of the church. I expected to hear something about a big faith experience or something, but what he said was, “Well, the minister came to see me in 1935 and said that my sister had joined this church and she thought I should come here, too. So I did.” And that was it.
The problem is that few people are finding their way to mainstream churches that way anymore. We are dwindling down to a core of True Believers, people interested in the social gospel and who believe that religion doesn’t have to be fundamentalist to have an impact both on the member and the world. That leaves out most church members of any denomination, so I imagine we’ll continue to shrink.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:13 am
Jose,
No matter how you try to clean it up, the fact that they are NOT releasing the ASA numbers is a bad thing. We just had General Convention where TEC leadership refused to release the cost of the lawsuits. The excuse of we can’t release that information because it will tip off our strategy, is bogus. Any one can see what is TEC’s strategy. The hiding of the ASA numbers and the cost of the lawsuits shows not only a lack of trust in the body that They(TEC leadership) is leading but it also shows fear and an attempt to control all aspects of the crisis. Last time I checked the last group of people who showed these type of governance traits was the Politburo of the USSR. Have you seen them lately? By stonewalling or refusing to disclose information you make it harder for people who are trying to be loyal stay that way. The ASA numbers are happening to all mainstream churches, the reaction to those numbers shows us a organization that is in deep crisis.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:29 am
“When a religion is good, I will conceive that it would support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that it’s professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign I apprehend of its being a bad one.” Benjamin Franklin
October 12th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
I agree with your second post more so than your first, Keith; that’s why I always object when the evangelicals want to call upon the power of the state to allow them to post the ten commandments on state property, or to inject religion into the public schools in a thousand different subtle ways, or to clutter up Federal land with crosses and things. You’d think if they truly were God’s chosen people, as they seem to believe, they wouldn’t need any help from the government.
As to your first post, though, I disagree. I used to do a lot of legal work in the area of shareholder disputes in closely held corporations and the like. In these situations, you’re often fighting people who are sitting on your own board of directors, and often litigation committees are formed to keep these matters confidential even within the organization itself.
Ditto the Episcopal Church: Release of the type of information that has been sought to the membership would naturally release it to everybody else, too. For better or worse, in law, the procedure has always been to keep things like the cost of litigation confidential until after it’s over, even for governmental bodies spending taxpayer money. One of the primary exceptions to Kentucky’s open records act is the need for confidentiality in ongoing litigation.
So, if we don’t require governmental bodies paying for legal services with our own tax dollars to release the cost, why should we expect a private organization to do so? We’d be amazed if General Motors or Microsoft released information like this. I realize that the Episcopal Church must be held to a higher standard than private businesses, but it still needs the breathing room to either settle its disputes or litigate them. After this is over, there will be no need for confidentiality, but there is today.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
James the latter page is no longer available and the church register omits Lexington Ky.
How interesting!
October 12th, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Re: “adversarial press”
What is necessarily wrong with journalists being adversarial? After the eight years of GWBush it is danged obvious that we need the media to ask tough questions and persevere if necessary. It’s their moral responsibility. HOWEVER…that does not mean that the subject of their scrutiny should just answer any and every question that is posed. To restate my earlier post: 1) The ECUSA leadership could have (and probably should have) been better prepared to explain why the membership numbers were not made public, and 2) the ECUSA spokespersons would have been downright stupid to answer Frank’s request for them to ad lib an approximation and an explanation. Which I think was Dave’s point too.
However I would rather not take someone’s word regarding whether the NYT and WaPo have been unfairly kind in their reporting of the troubles of the ECUSA. If these newspapers happened to neglect a bit of titillating gossip, or if they actually reported something newsworthy about the mission and outreach of the church instead of scandal, then bully for them and too bad for the disappointed spectators.
October 13th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Caleb Powers,
That response you gave on the cost of lawsuits was the best explanation I have heard on this topic. Thank you. However the fact that you explained it well still gives me concern. At this juncture in the life of the church it would be in TEC’s best interest to give clear and honest answers to these questions yet I find our leaders lacking in that regard.
Jose, when you have people looking at your motives and hidden agendas in everything that you do you, can’t give the impression that you are hiding something or that you don’t trust your own people. You are right, you shouldn’t trust the press, but as a leader you have to trust the people that you lead. I have been a rector of two churches and one thing that I have learned is you have to trust your people. Yes it can be painful and there people that will try to do you harm, but you have to trust them with the information. It’s their church and their money. The PB and President of House of Deputies may have made a ’smart’ decision, but it shows how little they trust the organization that they lead. And if that is the case then why bother to lead us?
October 13th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Now, now, BBB, You have it all wrong…It is just that with all this transparency, and dare I say, transcendence,the light is just too bright to see the numbers…Look into my eyes…TEC is growing…Look into my eyes, TEC is growing…Etc…
October 13th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Keith, you’re absolutely right about the actions of the Episcopal Church’s hierarchy. I do not think they have done a very good job running the public relations end of this thing at all. They should simply say, in the words of my father, that bidness is bidness, and they need to keep it confidential.
As far as whether the leadership of the organization trusts its membership, of course they don’t. I wouldn’t, either. That’s why we don’t allow state secrets to be broadcast on the CBS Evening News, because we don’t trust our own citizens. President Ford famously said that he’d be happy to tell every American every secret the government had, as long as it wouldn’t go any further. I suspect the same thing is true of the leadership of the Episcopal Church: They’d be happy to tell every loyal member the cost of the litigation and their full litigation strategy as long as it wouldn’t go any further.
The problem is that confidentiality really is necessary in litigation, if for no other reason than it gives the parties room to negotiate and try to work out their differences. And, if they do need to litigate some of these things, they need to be able to do that with some reasonable degree of confidentiality, too.
October 13th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Caleb,
I understand the need for confidentiality in litigation, that makes perfect sense. I do have a problem of avoiding releasing the ASA numbers. Before I was a priest I have worked in government and I understand the need for ‘a black budget’(classified expenditures), but I don’t feel that the ASA numbers fit that situation. Releasing the ASA numbers will be painful, but not as painful as the growing mistrust that is building within the church. Thanks to you I now understand that the cost of litigation is on a ‘need to know basis’, I don’t feel that the ASA numbers are in the same category.
October 13th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Your article isn’t entirely correct. The fall off happened much earlier. See:
http://books.google.com/books?id=DJsA6SRr39sC&lpg=PA2&ots=RBYpEf_kiu&dq=episcopal%20church%20attendance%20figures%20graph&pg=PA4#v=onepage&q=&f=false
October 13th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
If anything that should be learned from the lessons of the catholic church, it should be face the issues, don’t sugar coat it, don’t lie about, put it out there and deal with it. That is without a doubt the best and only true solution to this, anything else will just bring more turmoil to the church.
October 14th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Keith, I agree about the attendance numbers; that’s never been considered confidential and always has been released in the past. They need to be absolutely transparent about that.
October 14th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
David Virtue has released the numbers…I hope this site will do so as well…
October 15th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
[...] [...]
October 21st, 2009 at 9:51 am
[...] few weeks ago, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editor Frank Lockwood noted that The Episcopal Church had declined to release those statistics in September, even though they were supposed to come out in September. But today I [...]