Has The Episcopal Church Experienced Growth?
(ANALYSIS) I need your help, readers! If you’re poking around online and see that a major denomination has posted updated statistics about membership, attendance, giving or anything similar, please send me an email and point me to the data.
I’ve become somewhat of the unofficial “keeper of the records” when it comes to a lot of denominations, but I don’t get press releases or notifications when new data is posted. That means I sometimes miss things.
Well, I had a great supporter of my work shoot me a message that the Episcopal Church had posted some new data related to the life of their church in 2023. From a purely quantitative perspective, no denomination is better than the Episcopalians. They release all kinds of data beyond just membership.
Being able to triangulate a variety of trends — like baptisms, marriages, confirmations, giving, attendance and membership — is the ideal way to get a complete picture of what’s happening in those churches across the United States.
Let’s start with membership and work our way down to more granular metrics.
The high-water mark for the Episcopal Church was in 1959, with a reported total of 3.44 million members. Membership hovered around that number for the next dozen years, then began to decline, dipping below 3 million by 1973 and continuing a slow and steady drop over the decades. However, it was still around 2 million a decade ago.
Since 2012, the average yearly decline in Episcopal Church membership has been approximately 40,000. In 2020, it was about 55,000; the following year, it was 57,000; and between 2021 and 2022, it was 93,256 — the largest single-year decline in the past 25 years.
In 2023, the total reported membership of TEC was 1,547,779, down about 37,000 from the prior year (or 2.3%). So, not great news, but nothing unexpected.
The attendance numbers are sure to raise some eyebrows, though.
If you were to describe Episcopal attendance between 2009 and 2019, it would be a slow, steady decline. Average attendance began at around 725,000, decreasing by about 3% each year, reaching 547,000 by 2019. However, the pandemic clearly impacted TEC’s Sunday attendance.
Weekly attendance dropped by 11% between 2019 and 2020, then plummeted an astonishing 40% between 2020 and 2021. By 2021, the average Sunday attendance in the Episcopal Church was just 293,000.
It did rebound nicely in 2022 to 373,000, and the church’s statistics indicate a continued surge in attendance, reaching about 411,000 on an average weekend in 2023 — a 10-point increase from the previous year. In total, attendance increased by 40% between 2021 and 2023.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.