So, any discussion of why there is growth in CA, TX, Miss, GA, VT? Or examples of parishes that are growing and what they're doing?

There is a point where the "reality" of decline becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. Communities that turn around start focusing on what they do well and where the growth is...

If the decline started in the early 70s, is it safe to say that as a whole it's not centered on the hot button issues usually cited by some (BCP reform, women's ordination, the place of gay people in the Church)? That it's part of a general slide in mainline Churches? Are there figures available for what membership in the Roman Catholic Church in the States would be without an influx of immigrants? (Asking all this b/c charts and numbers are foreign languages to me).

Ugh. Hello Monday. But I concur that these statistics are something to be absorbed and taken seriously. I say this as a Youth and Family Minister in a Medium sized parish that has seen significant growth in the past few years. What has been at the heart of our growth? Of course a combination of things:

1. We are open to those who would like to have church in their lives but exited church years ago because it was overly simplistic and closed off to differing thoughts about God.

2. We have a warm group of folks who enjoy friendship with each other and can make room for new friends.

3. We participate in a couple specific community outreach efforts that people feel good about participating in.

Openness, friendship, legitimate work.

Of course there are intangibles in that mix, but my sense if that these are the pillars of this particular parish's success and that Christ in inhabiting each of these spheres. And I think it can be translated to other places, each with their own set of intangibles.

I do think the streamlining of our national work to give local Diocese the most resources possible to create this kind of inertia is putting us on the right track and hope and trust our Deputies, Bishops and Executive Council to make those decisions judiciously.

I also think its time the National Church to help us with some GRAND MARKETING, creating print and video media that can be used locally on websites, fB, twitter, etc. Something very similar to what I see from the UCC (God's still speaking) and the UMC (open minds, open hearts, open doors).

Science and faith kiss
faith embracing reason
ancient worship, forward living
tradition with fresh ideas
people healing hurts

I don't know...something!

Thanks for keeping my feet to the fire. --TimSean Youmans, Shawnee, OK

Tim,

I think you're right on! What if 815 strategized about resourcing successes and re-organized to support and build local ministries and mission?

I pray Executive Council will get there in their conversations, and what we see here is just the midpoint of the journey for our leaders...

Glad to see that people are (finally) paying attention to a 30+ year trend!

I'm encouraging us to move from "The Episcopal Church Welcomes You" (fitting in the 50's when there were people coming in the door for us to welcome) to "The Episcopal Church Invites You." Over 90% of people who come to a church as newcomers (not people switching churches) join because someone they knew invited them. This isn't random invitations -- you earn the right to invite. Build relationships and then invite people into your community (not organization). We need to learn how to be an inviting church -- both inviting as a church/organization and as a people who invite others.

The missional folks already have the need to be in the world covered. I believe we do need to join forces with God's mission in the world -- and do so as Christians, if not Episcopalians. Too often our "mission in the world" is indistinguishable from Target or Home Depot's outreach mission. Big business has discovered that doing good is good for business. So we need to do good in a way that proclaims the Gospel, and isn't just good citizenship (worthy as that is).

Finally, whatever you focus on in a system grows. So focus on where there is growth you want to see continue and not on the negative, discouraging, downward trends. Face those realities (don't avoid them), but focus on what you want to have grow.

Over 90% of people who come to a church as newcomers (not people switching churches) join because someone they knew invited them. This isn't random invitations -- you earn the right to invite. Build relationships and then invite people into your community (not organization). We need to learn how to be an inviting church -- both inviting as a church/organization and as a people who invite others.

Linda, thanks for this. This is precisely why the parish where I serve is growing, and we've focused our volunteer resources around this and the children's programs that are the hook. Surprisingly, this has required very little in the way of dollars. Somehow, we stumbled into the reality that the early Church understood: go with the Spirit. People show up at places where they are spiritually fed. Everything else follows.

Some other factors re growth and numerical decline:
- there is a general population migration to the sunbelt, including Episcopalians
- sunbelt church buildings tend to be newer and larger
- sunbelt congregations tend to have larger memberships, and therefore less financial stress.
- as a rough rule of thumb, it takes 150-175 pledges to support a full-time priest
- many 19th century church buildings can't contain enough people for the congregation to be financially viable. They also have proportionally higher maintenance and energy costs.
___

One unhappy pattern is to merge two failing congregations, sell one of the buildings and then the remnant members live off the proceeds without ever re-envigorating the congregation.

Growing congregations tend to grow by adding people the same age as the rector (and/or assisitant rector), plus or minus five years or so.

Hispanic congregations tend to grow because their members are younger and their families have more kids.
____

One of the best ways to grow is by starting new congregations located where population growth is about to occur. This takes many $$. The best way to get such $$ is from off-budget sources.

The TEC effort to do this at the national level (Mission Funding) was killed in the 2010-2012 budget passed in GC2009. Only the budget for raising $$ for a new Archives facilty was retained.
___

The usual response to figures such as those of Hadaway and Price is to say that we need more evangelism, and then do nothing to make it happen.

As we all know, one form of madness is to keep doing the same thing, expecting a new outcome each time.
___

What can we do differently in GC2012 to achieve more productive outcomes??

Ted Mollegen
Senior Deputy

Actually matters are worse than reported. The decline began in the mid-late 1960's - though it was gradual and few noticed it (I spotted it in the early 1980's.) Hardaway points only to the acceleration which is very rapid indeed. The question is - at this rate do we have more than 50 years before we simply vanish?

Coats - thanks for commenting - please sign your full name next time. ~ed.

"Over 90% of people who come to a church as newcomers (not people switching churches) join because someone they knew invited them."

There are a couple of ways to look at this statistic. The common conclusion, as with Linda and Richard, is to assume that personal invitation marketing (evangelism) is the most effective form of member recruitment.

However, one might also conclude that 90% of newcomers join through personal invitations because it is the only form of evangelism the church practices.

If 90% come by invitation from others, and we are still in steady decline, should we assume that doing more of the same will bring different results?

Steve Ayres

Gee, Steve, I don't know. As I said in my comment, I could only speak to its effectiveness at the local level in our (growing) parish. Nor did I say it was the only thing we were doing in terms of evangelism.

The exchange between Helmer and Ayres is helpful. The fact is, as a church, we have never really tried evangelism (well maybe in the early and mid 19th C. Therefore, as if starting from scratch, we must learn. Clearly many features are involved and not all work in every place. But we should try any and everything. It is if we were really a start-up company.

Bill Coats

Ted Mollegen asks what Gc can do. Well for one thing it can put Evangelism and growth as the main topic. We continue to think we should "speak to the world' or that if we ratchet up our out reach (which always has much attention at GC) this will lead to growth. It will not. Stop everything and say "We either grow or we die." This is not rocket science, Ted.
Bill Coats

@ Linda G:

I'm encouraging us to move from "The Episcopal Church Welcomes You" (fitting in the 50's when there were people coming in the door for us to welcome) to "The Episcopal Church Invites You."

I like it!

JC Fisher

My tweak:

No matter who you are...

You are

WARMLY INVITED

to the Episcopal Church

With the baby boom now behind us, all organizations face the reality that numbers will tend toward the negative, so let's not read too much into the numbers. That said, needs change over time, and we must meet those needs, or by definition we will be irrelevant.

I'd add, too, something that I have said before, which is that outreach and evangelism are not a solution if we are not taking care of those close to home. If we fail to meet the needs of our existing members, adding more members only increases the number of alienated people out there.

Eric Bonetti

It's too rosy to look back at that long slope from 1970 or that big bump in the mid 1960s and say, "it's all demographics." The most telling chart is that of ASA, which was rock-steady through the 1990s and has dropped off steadily ever since. By my calculation at least half if not more of the losses in the past couple of years were accounted for by the departing dioceses.

Can anyone provide a figure for overall church membership and attendance across all churches. It then might make sense to see what the TEC "share" of that is, and if that share has changed. The raw stats seem to me to be singularly uninformative in addressing the problem of decline, if the decline is due to a wider movement in the public rather than to something we are doing or failing to do.

Was there ever a time that ECUSA did evangelism well? It seems to me that during our heyday the "brand" sold itself - people were looking to improve their social standing, for example, or were dissatisfied with the drab liturgy and mental straight jackets of their own churches, and sought us out. Is there a time in our own history we can look to for inspiration, or is this basically a new skill ECUSA has to learn?

I think the bigger question that no one seems to be asking is: Is Christianity even relevant anymore?

Or a different way of asking that question would be: What do we--as a Christian community--offer people that is important enough to get them out of bed on Sunday morning? Or to open their wallets to support the work of the church?

In my opinion, the "Titanic" that is going down here is NOT the Episcopal Church. It is Western Christianity in general. The fastest growing religious affiliation in the U.S. is "None." We can talk all day about why TEC is in decline, but the truth is that people across the country are rejecting religion altogether.

And there are days when I really can't blame them...

Well, Bill, yeah: and that suggests (a) we are now doing something to repel people, and (b) that the panicky "we must change!" reaction is going to hurt us even more, because it's cutting into the core stuff that was our biggest sales point.

Tobias, the quality of statistics-keeping varies a lot, from PCUSA which as far as membership is concerned is probably better than us (the congregations have a financial incentive to keep their rolls up to date), to the Orthodox who are claiming two to three times as many members as they probably have. The only truly comparable, long-term data I know of is Gallup's affiliation numbers, and the problem with them is that they consistently say we have twice as many members as our own numbers say. ARIS/NSRI data only goes back to 1990 and has the same issue as Gallup data; the Glenmary data used in the Valpo maps was a single snapshot taken in 2000, though I think they have done some limited updating since then. The Pew Trust US Religious Landscape Survey doesn't split up data below "traditions" (e.g. their map of the "mainline tradition" shows us where the Lutherans and Methodists are; we aren't counted separately) and is also a single snapshot, but it has a lot of detailed breakout which is informative if not useful for this comparison.

Tobias and C, Wingate, for the life of me I cannot see how parsing these statistics gets us anywhere. The reality is we have been declining and everyone,everywhere feels it. As a result our only choice is to try get to work and figure how to grow a church. About this we have only minimul knowledge and practice. Well then let us go about our job and learn.
Bill Coats

Charles Wingate, if people used to join to improve their social standing and do not do so now, it could also be that ECUSA no longer offers as much of an advantage in that area. My parish, for example, used to have some of the movers and shakers of Rhode Island society and politics in the pews (although I don't think we were ever THE "society parish"), but they left some time ago. Now that we're not as much of a gathering place for the rich and famous, we've lost our market share of social climbers.

Of course, that's not nearly the whole story, but I think it could be part of it. Some people will think we're better off without the influential, but it seems to me that being truly catholic means drawing *all* sorts and conditions. And , of course, the explanation I've suggested doesn't preclude the possibility that we're doing things to repel people.

Paige, what you've outlined is not the sinking of the SS Western Christianity, but the whole religious fleet.

Bill Coats, doesn't figuring out how to grow a church necessarily entail figuring out what shrunk it, so we don't inadvertently make the problem worse?

From Kirk Hadaway - shared with permission:
No, there is no meaningful figure for overall membership and attendance. There is no one who is able to collect figures from all denominations (and independent churches) and the statistics for many large denominations are useless for computing totals. The Roman Catholics, for instance, basically count all baptized Catholics and do not count attendance except in certain dioceses. The Church of God in Christ (a large Black denomination) has not reported in many years and has what are probably grossly inflated numbers. The same is true for several other very large historic Black Baptist groups.

So if you can't count members and attendees directly, what about surveys? Americans presume membership, so that figure is unreliable. Attendance is exaggerated by nearly 100%, as I have shown in several published articles.

The best you can do is trace membership in the denominations that have reliable figures. The long-term pattern was mainline decline and conservative growth, with the overall total remaining about the same--until the last 5 years when the overall total began to decline. Mainline decline got worse and several large conservative bodies began to decline (Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod and Southern Baptist Convention, and a few others). If you want to add Roman Catholics to the mix, they have declined severely in many areas, but to a certain extent immigration has enabled them to keep up membership, if not attendance. Mormons have grown, but not nearly as much as reported. They do not drop people from their membership rolls and they have a very high birth rate (the rate of natural increase in Utah is higher than Mexico).

Kirk

Thanks, Kirk. Bill Coats, I have my own ideas about the nature of the decline, and I think it is a decline in an interest in institutional religion being replaced to a large extent by personal religion / spirituality. If that's the case, I think it best we hold on and ride it out, as historically these trends are cyclic -- to my estimation (in the absence of hard figures.) The old reasons for churchgoing / belonging --- (!) you'll go to hell if you don't; (2) all the best people do it --- no longer hold the majority of the population. I think we are in the US about a generation and a half behind Europe in this trend. The churches that will suffer most are those most linked to those old models.

A chief area of study for me was the history of religious communities. They mirror the church in many ways.

Ultimately, the traditional church is a "product" with a shrinking customer base. The crying needs out there now are, to my view, (1) transcendence and (2) relevance to the needs of the world. That, I think, is the coming wave, and I think Anglicanism is poised to catch it, if we can shed the burdens of sexism that still make the church dissonant with the new song.

Bill, No I don't think trying to figure out what happened will do us much good (tho I have my notions, as well). And no Tobias I don't think this historical recall matched with some idea of "riding it our" will do. There is a defeatism here which I don't buy (and I am olderthan most of you). The trick is to have confidence in the gospel and learn how we can spread it. After all since we have never tried to do it before, this should be an interesting adventure. Bill Coats

Bill, I don't think "defeatism" is what I'm talking about, but rather when I say riding it out I mean holding fast to exactly the preaching of the gospel and not trying to do the latest "marketing pitch" -- but we have to accept that "the Gospel" will have to be preached in ways that current generations, and the next, can accept it: the old combination of guilt and pride -- successful in the 50s -- won't work now, at least not for most people.

Tobias, there is a thin line between preaching the gospel to a current generation and a 'marketing pitch". In fact one may have to advert to the latter in order somehow to arrive at the former. Indeed I am in favor of such things as determining why the few who have joined our church did so, as well as determing our "market" niche. We also have much to learn from the evangelicals (even if we have to stay a bit clear). In other words full steam ahead: learn all we can and try as much as we can. You are still too cautious and pessimistic.
Bill

"The crying needs out there now are, to my view, (1) transcendence and (2) relevance to the needs of the world. "

I think this is exactly right, tobias haller. And the first belongs to the second, "needs of the world," category, I think.

In particular, we just cannot assume any more that people coming into the church know anything about it; we need to explain ourselves, and why Christianity is "relevant to the needs of the world."

We need, in other words, to have something to say other than "we don't check our brains at the door." That's fine - and true enough - but it's nowhere close to sufficient. That phrase fits people who already have - usually unfavorable - experience with Christianity. But it doesn't say anything at all to people who don't; it's completely meaningless, in fact.

We don't seem very articulate about how the faith can address "the needs of the world," and I think we need to get lots more so. In fact, I think we need to show how it's done exactly that, in the past and today.

I joined the church after 35 years outside it precisely because of what I observed about the "institution" - and the "institution" was the Catholic Church, BTW! - and the way it treated human beings: as if we were worthy of respect and had a dignity outside of what the world decided we were worth. It's pretty much the main reason I'm still here.

We need to make a case for the church - and we can.

Brief introduction... I'm a 39 y.o. cradle Episcopalian who continues to call myself an Episcopalian only tenuously. That is, my understanding of catholic order dictates that I be an Episcoplaian if I am to be an Anglican structurally, but I have fundamental theological disagreements with the recent past and future trajectory of TEC's leadership.
Oddly, then, I agree with several of Fr. Hallas's observations above, (though I disagree with his asessment of the needs we should look to fulfil).
I agree that the decline in interest in institutional religion does have a lot to do with the rise of personal spirituality, (as opposed to straight atheism). One only need to observe the religion shelves at Barnes & Noble overflowing with this kind of mystic drivel--yet with relatively few volumes advocating atheism--to understand that people are still searching for something.
I'll also concede the proposal, (though I would have used different language), that past primary motivations for churchgoing/belonging are (1) you'll go to Hell if you don't and (2) all the best people do it.
Let me ask, though, if this is the case, why does no one realize that TEC has shot itself in the foot? That TEC has made itself responsible for its own decline? I mean, for years TEC has advocated for and contributed to a culture that no longer believes in Hell, and stigmatizes personal wealth and social status. The very reason a society exists that believes church attendance is not fundamental to their salvation, and seeks to punish the successful and elite, is because TEC helped create it! Why then are we mystified at our decline?
Two of the greatest crying needs of the world ARE salvation and self-improvement, (avoidance of Hell and becoming the "best people"). The church should be re-creating the society that is drawn to the church, not changing to accommodate society's perceived yet irrelevant needs.

John H. Campbell

John, I agree with your conclusion but not your argument. I don't think TEC "caused" the societal shifts to which I refer -- but I do think it reflected them. And we are not alone: Vatican II did much the same for the RCC.

Ultimately, the Church needs to start preaching -- but better -- living the Gospel, which is about salvation in and with others, as opposed to the individualist salvation either of fundamentalist Christianity or the Barnes & Noble spirituality department. I think our Baptismal Covenant says it all -- but the biggest gap is between what those words say and what we practice: too much easy-peasy and a warm "welcome" to a comfortable pew, making few demands in the hearty language of rejecting Satan and turning to Christ and working for justice and peace. It isn't enough just to say those pious words. We are, above all, not called to accommodate society, but to transform it. And sadly, much of the institutional church stands in its own way... Like the disciples in Gethsemane, we have been sleeping while we should have been watching, praying and working. It is time to wake up and get to work.

I am glad to see Tobias full of more spirit. John has pointed to a problem. Our easy accomodation with secularism has not been helpful. But Hell and self-improvement? Certainly the latter has been trumpeted within for as long as I have been in the church, How we both affirms certain aspects of secualarism and oppose others is, I believe, crucial. But more is needed than bromides about justice and turning to Christ - both of wchich are laudable. We lack a way to attack meaninglessness and we are loathe to name the principalities - work, sex, nationalism, power, entertainment - the idols which the culture seeks but which in fact enslave. That is we need to explore the many ways we are saved in and by Jesus. And may I suggest we cut this nonsense of praying to the "Holy One' or in "his holy name" the conventional dodge to facing Jesus square on.