The
Episcopal Church’s Collapse
More sunny news for
your Sunday morning: numbers from the
Episcopal Church show a stunning collapse in church attendance between 2000 and
2010. It’s down 23 percent overall, with some dioceses in far
steeper decline than that. Pittsburgh, for example, has lost 73 percent of its
churchgoing Episcopalians over that time period. That’s nearly three out of
four Episcopalians in Pittsburgh, gone within a decade. San Joaquin saw four
out of five of its people stop coming to church in the same period.
No diocese is growing,
but a handful of them — Tennessee and South Carolina, for example — kept losses
down to single digits. Maybe some of you readers who are Episcopalians can
explain why. It can’t be simply a Southern thing; other Southern dioceses
experienced losses on par with TEC in other regions.
According to TEC’s
figures, only about 700,000 Episcopalians are in church on Sunday morning.
There are megachurches in suburban Dallas that have more worshipers on Sunday
than most Episcopal dioceses. That’s not hyperbole.
I found this out via the blog of
Sherry Weddell, the Catholic lay evangelist, who writes:
To compare, CARA
estimates that on a given Sunday, there are about 22 million Catholics in the
pews in the US vs. approximately 657,000 Episcopalians. In other words, there
are roughly 33 times as many practicing Catholics as practicing Episcopalians.
This is not a time to
gloat but to thoughtfully ponder. A group I spoke to recently about
evangelization wanted to look to the experience of mainline Protestants to see
what they were doing. Seriously?
If we are serious
about evangelization, we would far, far better look to the experience of our
evangelical brothers and sisters. 49% of American evangelicals weren’t raised
as evangelicals while Catholics have the second lowest number of converts of
any American religious faith.
Indeed, Putnam & Campbell, sifting the data,
found that if not for the large influx of Hispanic immigrants, Catholicism in
the US would be declining at a rate comparable to that of mainline
Protestantism.
But no Christian
church should gloat, and not just out of politeness, either. Putnam &
Campbell documented that all Christian churches are seeing declining numbers.
We are living through a great shift in religion and society now.
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